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CONDITIONS OF SUCCESS IN PREACHING 
WITHOUT NOTES. 



THREE LECTURES 

DELIVERED BEFORE THE STUDENTS OF THE 

UNION THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY, 

NEW YORK: 
January 13, 20, 27 : 1875 ; 



frtfr arc gippenbi*. 



BY 



RICHARD S. STORRS, D.D. ; LL.D., 



.- 



OF BROOKLYN, N.Y. 



73 



DODD AND MEAD, 

762 Broadway, N.Y. 
I875- 




&*z 



€ 



.t* 



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— i — ^-^ m 



The Library 
? Congress 

washington 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1875, by 
DODD AND MEAD, 

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 



Boston : 

Stereotyped and Printed by 

Rand, Avery, & Co. 



IX) 

> 



CONTENTS. 

— • 

PAGE 

First Lecture 9 

Second Lecture 70 

Third Lecture . . . . . . . -131 

Appendix 209 



PREFATORY NOTE. 



In marking out the course of thought to be pur- 
sued in the following lectures the writer of this note 
had no more intention of preparing a volume, how- 
ever slight, on the best method of preaching the 
Gospel, than he had of composing a treatise on 
Ethics, or an essay on Fine Art. His only design 
was, in compliance with the invitation of the hon- 
ored President and Faculty of the Union Theo- 
logical Seminary, to say some words to the students 
of that institution, especially to those of the senior 
class, on his own experience in preaching without 
notes, and on the lessons which this had taught him 
as to the most effective mode of preparing for 
the work. 

The one lecture which at first was contemplated 
grew into three ; and if the three had been multi- 

5 



PREFATORY NOTE. 



plied by three, the subject would have remained 
inadequately" treated. It was not till after the first 
of them had been delivered that the lecturer was 
advised, by the present publisher, that arrangements 
had been made for fully reporting them, and that, 
unless positive objection were made, they would be 
printed. Certainly no book was ever made, there- 
fore, with less of pre-determination on the part of 
the author. 

It seems only reasonable to ask that any one into 
whose hands the book may fall will remember the 
way in which it came to exist, and will not expect 
from it something more and other than it seeks to 
supply. The lectures were spoken, without having 
been written ; and the author would not have felt at 
liberty to recast them, even if he had had the leisure 
for the work. Here and there a phrase or a sentence 
has been changed ; a word has occasionally been 
substituted for another, when that selected at the 
instant of speaking seemed not the best as more 
quietly reviewed ; and in one instance an unimpor- 
tant paragraph has been transferred from one part 
of a lecture to another more fitting. Otherwise, the 



PREFATORY NOTE. J 

lectures are printed as delivered, — this being the 
wish of all concerned with them. 

The style of them is, therefore, so entirely without 
the elaboration in which authors delight that if 
pride of authorship alone were to be consulted they 
certainly would not now be published. But the 
thoughts expressed in them are such as had com- 
mended themselves to the lecturer, in his own min- 
isterial life and work, and such as he therefore had 
no hesitation in presenting to others, in the form 
of free and familiar discourse. He does not now 
shrink from presenting them to the public, though 
quite aware how slight is their claim to any general 
attention, and how different would have been the 
form to be given them if he had contemplated 
making a book. 

They are published, at the expressed desire of 
some who had heard them, and of more who had 
not ; in the hope that, with all their obvious imper- 
fections, they may contribute something, of encour- 
agement if not of more special assistance, to those 
who would speak the unchanging truth with which 
God crowds and crowns the Gospel, out of a fur- 



8 PREFATORY NOTE. 

nished and quickening mind, without that perpetual 
bondage to the pen which presses heavily on many 
ministers. 

Richard S. Storrs. 
Brooklyn, February 15, 1875. 



FIRST LECTURE. 



Mr. President : Young Gentlemen : — 

There will be no misunderstanding between 
us, I presume, as to my general purpose and 
plan in coming hither, or in what I am to say 
to you, now and hereafter. I do not come, of 
course, to deliver systematic and elaborate lec- 
tures, on the subject upon which I am to speak. 
You have Professors to do that; with leisure, 
skill, and an aptness for the office, which I do 
not possess ; and I should only be intruding 
myself upon their function, without invitation 
and without warrant, if I were to attempt any 
thing of the kind. I have come simply to talk 
to you a little, in a familiar way, of the con- 
ditions of success in preaching without notes ; 
and to offer some thoughts, concerning these 

9 



10 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

conditions, which are suggested to me by my 
own experience. 

I have thought, in looking back on my Semi- 
nary course, that I should have been glad if 
some one who had entered the ministry before 
me had then told me, frankly and fully, as I 
hope to tell you, what he had learned by any 
efforts which he had made in this direction. So 
I have cheerfully accepted the invitation to do 
for you what I see I should have been glad to 
have had some one else then do for me. 

I am somewhat abashed, I confess, at finding 
so many present whom I have not come prepared 
to address : Professors, Secretaries, Clergymen, 
Lawyers, Editors, and others — many of them 
masters of every art and power of eloquence, as 
I am not, and far better qualified to instruct me 
on the subject than I am to give suggestions 
to them. But I shall not be diverted from the 
one purpose which has brought me hither — to 
talk familiarly and freely to you. If what I am 
to say shall seem common-place, as very likely 



LESSONS OF EXPERIENCE. II 

it will, to these gentlemen whose presence I did 
not anticipate, I can only remind them that they 
are not here at my invitation, and that if they 
choose to take part of their purgatory in this 
life, and in this particular fashion, we cannot 
object. But I have only you to speak to ; and 
shall not turn aside to consider whether that 
which is in my mind is, or is not, what they 
have come to hear. 

As I said, the suggestions which I make will 
be largely those derived from my personal expe- 
rience. I do not know that you will find much 
profit in them, for I remember the remark of 
Coleridge that ' experience is like the stern-light 
of a ship at sea : it enlightens only the track 
which has been passed over.' There are such 
differences between men, in temperament, habit, 
mental constitution, the natural and customary 
methods of work, that the experience of one may 
not suggest much of value to another, and I 
shall not be disappointed if mine is not very ser- 
viceable to you. Indeed, this matter of speak- 



12 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

ing freely to a public assembly, without notes, is 
eminently one in regard to which every man 
must learn for himself ; and no one can make 
his own method a rule for another, unless he can 
simultaneously exchange minds with him — a 
thing which in our case would be neither pos- 
sible for me, nor perhaps profitable for you. 
Still : the rules which experience suggests are 
likely to be better than those which theorists 
elaborate in their libraries ; and I have got 
more help myself from hints of others, working 
in the same direction, than from any discussions 
in learned treatises. So I shall give you what I 
can, and hope for the best ; and if any thing 
which I may say shall prove to be of service to 
you, I shall be amply rewarded for the work. 

To lay the foundation for my remarks I will 
state rapidly what my experience in the matter 
has been. 

I was in part educated for the bar ; and was 
at one time quite familiar with the Boston court- 
rooms, at a period when the Suffolk-bar was at 



THE SUFFOLK BAR. 1 3 

the height of its power and fame. Mr. Webster 
was there, in the intervals between the sessions 
of the Senate, in the maturity and splendor of 
his majestic intelligence. Mr. Choate was there 
— under whose direction I was prosecuting my 
studies — whose genius seemed an oriental exotic, 
brilliant, luxuriant, among the common ferns 
and brake of New England. Mr. Benjamin R. 
Curtis was there, — recently deceased, then in 
the prime of his force and his career, — whose 
power of perspicuous and persuasive legal state- 
ment surpassed that, I think, of any speaker 
whom I have since anywhere heard. With 
these were associated others, not so prominent 
then or since before the public, but only second 
to them in faculty and in training. 

All these men, of course, were in the habit of 
speaking constantly, without notes, before the 
full Bench, or to the Jury ; in the most impor- 
tant and difficult cases, as well as in those of 
lighter consequence ; when arguing difficult 
questions of law, as well as when discussing an 



14 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

issue of facts. I never knew but one lawyer 
who was in the habit of reading his arguments 
from a full manuscript ; and he, though an able, 
was a remarkably timid man, whose argument 
was always addressed to the Judge, not to the 
Jury. 

I could not see, therefore, why a minister — 
however limited in faculty and in culture, in 
comparison certainly with these eminent men — 
should not do that before his congregation, which 
lawyers were doing all the time in the courts ; 
and when my plans of life were changed, under 
the impulse as I thought of God's Spirit, and I 
had devoted myself to the ministry, I determined 
if possible to fit myself to do this, and to preach 
without reading. It seemed to me that this was 
the more apostolic way, at least. I could not 
learn that Paul pulled out a Greek manuscript, 
and undertook to read it with his infirm eyes, 
when he addressed the woman at Philippi; or 
even when he spoke on Mars Hill, under the 
shadow of the Propylea and the Parthenon, to the 



TRAINING IN THE SEMINARY. 1 5 



critical Athenians. It seemed to me that to 
speak to men without notes, out of a full and ear- 
nest mind, was now as then the most natural and 
effective way to address them ; the way most fit- 
ting to those sublime and practical themes which 
the preacher of the Gospel has to present, and to 
the interests, so immensely important, which he 
is to subserve. And I was distinctly and delibe- 
rately determined, if it was in my power to 
accomplish* it, to learn to speak thus, and not to 
either read my sermons, or write them out and 
commit them to memory. 

Accordingly, I did some training for this in 
my Seminary course ; but it was not much, nor 
was it particularly fruitful of good. I presume 
that you are here encouraged in such efforts, 
guided, and stimulated. I presume the students 
at Andover are so now, under the present regime. 
But in my time there — as some of these gentle- 
men present will remember, who were there with 
me — such a method of preaching was not looked 
upon with particular favor. Th-e atmosphere of 



1 6 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

the Seminary was not friendly or helpful to it. It 
was about as trying an ordeal as a man can well 
pass to stand up and speak without a manuscript, 
in the lecture-room or the chapel. I don't know 
that the criticism which was encountered was 
any more severe than it should have been. I 
am sure it was never intentionally oppressive or 
unjust. But it was most thoroughly searching 
and exact ; so that if a man had any weaknesses 
or faults about him, as all of us had, he was 
sure enough to find them out, and was usually 
glad, after one experiment, to take refuge in 
future behind his notes. 

I got some practice in the debating society ; 
and two or three times, as I remember, adven- 
tured upon short public speeches, without notes 
in my pocket. But on the whole I lost rather 
than gained, in this regard, in my Seminary 
course ; and when I came out was hardly as 
eager, perhaps, so far as courage and confidence 
were concerned, was hardly as well fitted, to 
preach without notes as I should have been ear- 



SETTLEMENT AT BROOKLINE. \J 

lier. My conviction on the subject remained, 
however ; and I was still resolved to get used to 
this method, and to employ it, if I could. 

My first settlement in the ministry was at 
Brookline, near Boston ; in a charming suburban 
parish, but with a congregation not helpful to my 
plans in regard to this matter of the method 
of preaching. In a church capable of holding 
five hundred or six hundred people we had usu- 
ally, in the winter, a congregation of perhaps 
seventy-five to a hundred. They were as affec- 
tionate and appreciative hearers as any man need 
ask or hope for. But the majority of them were 
cultured, careful, critical hearers, who required a 
high intellectual tone in whatever was said to 
them, and were instantly sensitive to its absence. 

They had been trained under the Boston pul- 
pits, the ministers in which almost universally — 
perhaps quite universally — then read their ser- 
mons ; and, though kind as they could be, they 
were inevitably exacting in their demand for pre- 
cision and elegance of literary form. It was a 



1 8 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

scattered assembly, of individuals, and of sepa- 
rated households. There was no mass of hearers, 
to be kindled and swayed by a common enthu- 
siasm, and in turn to react upon the preacher : 
they were not numerous enough for that, and the 
building itself was relatively too large. They 
were most of them, of course, older than I was, 
and I was diffident in speaking before them on 
subjects much longer familiar to them than they 
had been to me. They were more or less 
anxious, too, as to the impression to be made by 
my preaching on the Unitarian or Episcopalian 
outsiders who frequently made a part of the con- 
gregation ; and so were uneasy and apprehensive 
when I rose without notes, and jubilant whenever 
they saw these before me. 

I made my endeavors, more than once, to carry 
out the plan which I had proposed, and preach 
without a manuscript before me ; but it was all 
the time like swimming up the rapids, while with 
the manuscript I had only to float easily on the 
current. I tried to combine the advantages of 



USE OF A SKELETON. I9 

both methods : to have notes before me, a some- 
what full skeleton of my discourse, and then to 
be at liberty, in the intervals between the heads 
and sub-heads, to avail myself of any suggestions 
that might come. But this plan I found, for me 
— however it may be for others — the poorest 
possible. I lost all fluency, and continuity of 
thought. The intervals were not long enough, 
between my prepared heads, to allow the mind 
to get freely, freshly, vigorously at work. Just 
as my mental glow began, if it did begin, it had 
to be checked by returning to the manuscript. 
My utterance was inevitably interrupted, sus- 
pended, at the moment at which it might other- 
wise have come to be easy and spontaneous. I 
could never get force enough, between the recur- 
ring references to my notes, to push the sermon 
home upon my hearers, or even to carry my own 
mind through it with any sense of liberty and 
vigor. The whole sermon became a series of 
jerks. There was no gathered and helpful mo- 
mentum, toward the end, or anywhere else. I 



20 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

lost the foresight of the end from the beginning ; 
was wholly engrossed in taking each successive 
step correctly, when I should come to it. I 
became timid, retrospective, and had no sense of 
real mastery over the theme, or of any mastery 
whatever over the minds to which I was speak- 
ing. 

So I gave up that plan, then and there, and 
have never once thought of trying it since. It 
would be to me like running a race, with a ball 
and chain attached to each foot. I should read 
every sermon I ever preached, if that were to 
be the only alternative. 

During the year which I spent at Brookline, I 
persevered in these efforts to get free from 
necessary dependence on my notes ; but I do 
not think that I ever once, in the pulpit there, 
on the Sunday, had any true sense of liberty and 
joy in public utterance, unless I was reading. 
It was a steady hard struggle, from, first to last, 
for conscious freedom in public speech ; with 
almost no sense of success, and with very little 



FIRST SERMON AT BROOKLYN. 21 

reward, except as my will got hardened by it. I 
don't know whether I should have kept on or 
not, if I had stayed there longer. 

It so happened that the first sermon which I 
ever preached at Brooklyn — the only one, 
indeed, which I ever preached there before 
being called to the Church of the Pilgrims — 
was preached without notes. I was called 
upon unexpectedly for the service, as I was 
passing through the city, and when I had with 
me no manuscript sermons. But I had a subject 
in mind on which I had written not long before, 
in which I had been at the time much inter- 
ested, and of which I had made a thorough 
analysis. The course of thought pursued in 
the sermon was fresh in my mind, though the 
notes were not with me. I preached in a lec- 
ture-room, which was wholly filled with attentive 
hearers. I had no sort of fear of the congrega- 
tion, which was entirely made up of strangers 
to me ; and I found as I went on, in the treat- 
ment of the subject with which I had made 



22 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

myself previously familiar, that the mind worked 
with a facility, a force, a sense of exhilaration, 
which I never had had in reading from a manu- 
script. I enjoyed the service, and had a certain 
sense of Christian success in it. The people 
were interested ; and their interest had an in- 
stant reflex influence upon my own mind, so that 
the success became duplicated. It seemed to 
me, at the end, that it must be always easy and 
pleasant, under similar conditions, to repeat that 
experiment. 

When, therefore, I was called to that church, 
and had decided to go there, I was fully deter- 
mined to carry out this plan of preaching with- 
out notes, occasionally at least, at all hazards. I 
was twenty- five years old, and thought I knew 
something : — as men are apt to think, at that 
time of life. I had had a year's practice in the 
pulpit, such as it was, and had gained some free- 
dom and confidence from it. The congregation 
at Brooklyn was certainly larger than the one to 
which I had ministered before, and it seemed to 



SERMON AFTER INSTALLATION. 23 

me likely to be more sympathetic with a freer 
tone and style of speech. I was more certain 
than ever that I should find relief and help in 
my preferred method of preaching, if I could 
master it ; and I was resolved to master it, if 
the thing could be done. 

So the first sermon which I preached, after 
my Installation, was preached without notes. It 
was very nearly a dead failure. It was an abso- 
lute failure, so far as any sense of liberty on 
my part, or any useful effect on the people, was 
concerned. I have the notes of it still ; and not 
long ago, in looking over old papers, I happened 
upon these, and read them over. I saw at a 
glance what the secret of the failure had been. 
I had made too much preparation in detail ; had 
written out heads, sub-divisions, even some pas- 
sages or paragraphs in full, in order that I might 
be certain beforehand to have material enough 
at command ; and the result of it was that I was 
all the time looking backward, not forward, in 
preaching ; trying to remember, not only pre- 



24 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

arranged trains of thought but particular forms 
of expression, instead of trusting to the impulse 
of the subject, and seeking to impress certain 
great and principal features of it on the congre- 
gation. 

My verbal memory has always been the 
weakest part of my mental organization. I 
hardly dare trust myself now to quote a sen- 
tence from any writer, without having it before 
me in manuscript. I had wholly overloaded this 
verbal memory, in my preparation for the ser- 
vice ; and the inevitable consequence was that 
it and I staggered along together, for perhaps 
twenty-five minutes, and then stopped. I sank 
back on the chair, almost wishing that I had been 
with Pharaoh and his hosts when the Red Sea 
went over them ! The people were disap- 
pointed, and I was nearly sick. I am quite 
certain that if the proposal to invite me to 
Brooklyn had been made subsequently to that, 
instead of before it, I never should have been 
called to that congregation ! I went back to the 



LECTURES AND ADDRESSES. 25 

reading of manuscript sermons, and doubted for 
a good while if I should ever again try another 
method. I could not hazard another mortifica- 
tion so keen as that, or another failure so com- 
plete. 

However, after a time, the old feeling revived, 
and it seemed a shame to give it up so. I 
always preached my weekly lectures without 
notes, or with only brief ones ; and that helped 
and encouraged me to again try it in the 
church, as swimming in the pond helps one by- 
and-by to swim out fearlessly in the open sea. 
I was in the habit, too, of making occasional 
addresses, as other clergymen did, on public 
anniversary occasions ; and in giving these, as 
we always did, without notes, it was continual- 
ly anew impressed upon me that it must be 
possible to do the same in the pulpit, and that 
there would come with it a certain increase of 
independence and of power. 

I remember an occasion, for example — it 
must have been twenty-four or five years ago — 



26 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

in the old Broadway Tabernacle, at an anni- 
versary of the Bible Society, when I had a 
conscious pleasure and freedom in speaking, an 
invigoration of mind in the very process of speak- 
ing, which reading from a manuscript never had 
given. The subject was one familiar to me, 
through my connection at that time with the 
Committee of Versions. The occasion was an 
important one : the assembly was very large, 
crowding the platform, filling the house, abso- 
lutely. It was a responsive, sympathetic assem- 
bly, full of a diffused enthusiasm which at- 
tracted and rewarded whatever was said that 
w r as worth being heard. There was a pull from 
without, as well as an incessant push from 
within. The audience and the speaker reacted 
on each other. A man could hardly help speak- 
ing easily, joyfully, in such surroundings ; and I 
wished afterward, oftentimes, that the same ex- 
perience which one now and then thus gained 
upon the platform could be transferred to the 
pulpit, and could there become customary. 



RELIGIOUS INTEREST HELPFUL. 2J 

After a time there came a growing religious 
interest, working and widening throughout the 
congregation ; and that helped greatly to preach 
without a manuscript. The people were more 
moved by the more direct address, and wel- 
comed it eagerly. My own mind was more quick 
with a vivid realization of the meaning and the 
importance of the Divine message. It acted 
more ardently and intensely upon subjects, and 
found it more natural to speak of these in words 
which had not been prearranged by the pen. 
Preacher and people were all lifted by the 
impulse, as the steamship is carried over the 
bar by the swelling tide which imperceptibly 
swings it upward. They were more sympa- 
thetic ; I was more strongly moved by my sub- 
jects, and more intent on practical results: and 
so I began to get hold of them, at last, in this 
mode of preaching. Individuals would now and 
then tell me of impressions made on them, or 
on their friends, of helps given, of new thoughts 
started, of words that had become warnings or 



28 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

motives ; and more frequently than not these 
had come from sermons unwritten. So, though 
far from feeling at ease, as an habitual thing, 
when I entered the pulpit without my notes, I 
had an occasional sense of success in dispensing 
with them, and began to do it with more and 
more of facility and of confidence. 

When I speak of " success," Gentlemen, you 
will of course understand me as speaking only 
of relative success ; of success, as compared with 
previous failure. Nobody can be more perfectly 
aware than I am that in no other than this lim- 
ited and personal sense have I ever reached 
" success ; " and there seems a certain unwar- 
rantable assumption in my speaking to you of its 
conditions. But the navigator may know the 
route which must be taken to reach the North 
Pole, though he himself has never been there ; 
and so I think that I have learned what are the 
necessary conditions of a success which is far 
enough from my attainment. 

I used now and then, at the time I refer to, to 



CONTINUING EMBARRASSMENT. 29 

have this occasional, partial sense, of a relative 
success, in preaching without notes. 

But I was still always embarrassed by a 
degree of uncertainty as to how far I should be 
able in the pulpit to develop my subject ; and 
the amount of the previous preparation which 
I had made appeared to give no measure and no 
prophecy of the freedom in preaching which I 
should enjoy. In fact, the two seemed often to 
stand in an inverse ratio ; so that the more ample 
the preparation, the more meagre and unsatis- 
factory might be the discourse. I almost always 
approached the service, therefore, with a distinct 
timidity ; and was careful to preach without 
notes in the morning, if at all, when I had most 
of freshness and strength, and when I knew of 
the written sermon held in reserve, on which I 
could -fall back for the second service, — thus 
redeeming in part any special failure which the 
morning might witness. 

This went on for a number of years ; till at 
last, a dozen years ago or so, after I had been in 



30 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

Brooklyn for sixteen or seventeen years, I began 
to feel that growing sense of the oppressiveness 
of routine, and that teasing desire for a change 
of field, which almost every minister feels after 
many years of continuous service in the same 
parish. It seemed to me that the people were 
getting so accustomed to my ways of conceiving 
and presenting truth that they were now insen- 
sitive to them ; and that some decided change 
in the teaching mind would be to them of ser- 
vice. But that was not the worst of it. I felt 
myself getting into ruts, in regard to my method 
of treating subjects, my modes of argument, 
expression, illustration. It seemed to me that 
the mind itself was in danger of drying up ; that 
it needed a decided and positive change, to give 
it impulse, vivacity, flexibility, and to prevent it 
from becoming rigid and narrow. In other 
words, I was growing restless ; and was nearly 
persuaded that the people would be better for a 
new mind in the pulpit, and that I should be 
better for another field of labor. If it had been 



NEED OF SOME CHANGE. 3 1 

easy and right for me to leave my parish, and 
take another, I should almost certainly then have 
done so. But in the existing circumstances 
of my church I did not feel at liberty to leave 
it ; and the case was one of those in regard to 
which one has to consider, you know, what Pro- 
fessor Stuart used to call the terminus ad quern as 
well as the terminus a quo. So, as I had neither 
liberty to leave, nor any special invitation to go 
elsewhere, it seemed plainly my duty to stay 
where I was, and to find some other way of over- 
coming the tendencies which had begun to 
embarrass me. 

The only way that I could think of was to 
make a decided change in my method of work- 
ing ; to do thenceforth habitually, what until 
then I had done only occasionally ; and to make 
it thereafter my principal aim, in my public min- 
istry, to present subjects to the congregation 
without immediate help from a manuscript. 
This involved important changes in my whole 
way of working, both before preaching, and in it ; 



32 PREACHIXG WITHOUT NOTE! 



and I thought might have the effect which I 
desired, on the people, and on myself. 

I communicated my purpose, privately, to a 
number of the principal members of the con- 
gregation, and gave them my reasons for it. 
They were abundantly satisfied with the de- 
cision. It came to be generally understood, be- 
fore long, that a written sermon was never to 
be expected in the morning ; and after that I 
was not embarrassed by any surprise on the part 
of my hearers when they saw me open the Bible, 
and begin the discourse, without paper before 
me. I still wrote for the evening-service ; but 
that gradually became less important in com- 
parison with the morning, and the far larger 
part of my time ami force was given to the 
sermon which was to be preached without a 
manuscript. 

From that time I had more and more of 
facility and freedom in preaching in this way, 
The people became accustomed to it, and most 
of them preferred it. Those who came later 



ACADEMY OF MUSIC. 33 

into the congregation, found me established in 
the practice, and expected nothing else. And 
so that method was finally fixed, for one service 
on every Sunday. 

After a number of years of this practice, in 
1869, while our church-edifice was being recon- 
structed, my congregation was thrown for many 
months into the Academy of Music for its place 
of worship. The seats there were all free ; and 
the assemblies, gathered from all parts of the 
town, especially in the evening, were large and 
very miscellaneous. One of the Professors in the 
Divinity School at Cambridge, who was remon- 
strated with for leaving his chair of theological 
instruction in order to take a seat in Congress, 
is said to have replied, that perhaps the objector 
was not quite aware what the extent of his op- 
portunity was as a teacher of theology. ' There 
were indeed three men in his class : one of them 
was a sceptic, one a dyspeptic, and the third a 
Swedenborgian.' Well, I had all these, and a great 
many of other sorts and conditions, from the 



34 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

most devout and intelligent of worshippers to 
the most entirely indifferent and careless, with 
a larger proportion of unbelievers than is com- 
monly to he found in a Sunday congregation. 

It was simply idle to try to hold the attention 
of an audience so various, promiscuous, and un- 
trained as that, while reading from a manuscript. 
Numbers of them would have laughed in my 
face, and have left the house. Certainly, they 
would never have come a second time. Insert- 
ing a manuscript between them and myself, 
would have been like cutting the telegraph-wires, 
and putting a sheet of paper into the gap. See 
if you then can send your message on the wire ! 
The electricity would not pass. So I gave up 
the manuscript on the spot, the first night, and 
preached thenceforth both morning and even- 
ing without any notes. I have never written 
but one sermon since ; and that was for a special 
occasion, outside altogether of my own congre- 
gation. 

It is an entire mistake to suppose, as some 



FAILURE OF HEALTH. 35 

have done, that I broke down in health in con- 
sequence of this change, or in consequence of 
the new work in the Academy, and of the strain 
which came with it. That was due wholly to 
other causes, and many things contributed to it. 
I had been preaching for twenty-five years, with 
only the brief summer-vacations in all that time. 
I had had a large, an always increasing, pastoral 
work. For thirteen years I had been one of the 
editors of a leading religious newspaper. I had 
for many of those years been in the habit of lec- 
turing often, during the winter. I had freely 
accepted public responsibilities, some of which 
brought much labor with them, in the city which 
I live in. I was nearly at the end of all my 
resources, of strength and nerve-force, when 
we began reconstructing the church ; and that 
brought with it its own anxieties and burdensome 
cares. During the winter at the Academy I had 
a succession of prostrating colds, which left me 
at last at a very low point of vital energy. In 
the summer which followed, after we had re- 



36 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

turned to the church, I was visited with sudden 
and heavy domestic grief, from whose shock and 
shadow I could not rally. I was simply worn out, 
with severe, long-protracted, unremitting hard 
work ; and I then did, what I should have done 
years before, except for my father's advanced 
age, and my desire to be near him — I went to 
F.urope, for a year and more, to let the exhausted 
forces rally, and give nature a chance to restore 
the excessive vital waste. 

I returned from Europe refreshed, as I had 
hoped, in body and in mind, and resumed my 
work according to the method which I have de- 
scribed ; and have maintained it, as I said, ever 
since. Instead of breaking me down, it had 
enabled me, I am certain, to go on at least a year 
or two longer than I otherwise could have done ; 
and neither the people nor I had the least desire 
for any change in it. I shall certainly never 
depart from it hereafter, while I continue to 
preach at all. 

I am afraid, Gentlemen, that you will think I 



TWO METHODS CONTRASTED. 37 

have dwelt too long on this common-place 
experience of mine ; but I have been asked to 
give you such suggestions as grow out of this, 
and so it seemed needful to tell you at the outset 
just what it had been. It is very unimportant, 
except as it gives me a certain right, perhaps, to 
speak of the relative advantages of the two 
modes of preaching — with notes, and without 
them. I hope I have not seemed egotistical in 
it, for my only desire is to serve and help you ; 
and for that purpose, only, I have delayed upon 
the matter. I wrote for many years, fully, and 
carefully. I now write only a brief outline of the 
discourse, covering usually one or two sheets of 
common note-paper, and have no notes before 
me in the pulpit — not a line, or a catch-word. 
So I think I know how the one method operates, 
and how the other, on both preacher and people ; 
and I see — certainly more clearly than I used 
to — what is necessary to one's success if he 
would address a public assembly without com- 
mitting to memory what he says, and without 



38 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

aid from present notes. The ideal of that suc- 
cess we may none of us realize. But I think 
we may all of us make some approach to it, if 
we earnestly try. 

Now for some general suggestions, growing 
out of this experience, which I shall present as 
preliminary to others, more detailed and specific, 
that I design to offer hereafter. 

First, let me say : Never begin to preach with- 
out notes with any idea of saving yourselves 
work by it. — If you do, you will fail ; and you 
will richly deserve to fail. Any suspicion of this 
among your people will destroy your hold on 
them. Your own minds will deteriorate ; and 
your sermons will lose, not finish only, but body 
and vigor. 

Of course there is a certain amount of nervous 
fatigue connected witJi the compulsory use of 
the pen — especially of a steel-pen, a gold-pen, 
or any other with an inflexible handle — which is 
saved when a man only writes as he feels like it, 
and not under pressure : and this is an impor- 



THOUGHTS AT ODD MOMENTS. 39 

tant gain to one who has been emancipated from 
notes. There is a gain in release from confining 
desk-work, and from constant bondage to pre- 
scribed hours. A man who writes his sermons 
fully sometimes becomes so wearied with the 
intent application of eye and hand, while mak- 
ing the manuscript, that he hardly can rally to 
deliver the sermon with as much of glow as he 
gave it in writing. One who trains his mind to 
work without the pen finds, after a while, that he 
can meditate his discourses while he is walking ; 
while he is doing errands ; while he is sitting in 
the parlor, waiting for the friend on whom he 
is calling. The whole plan of a sermon will 
sometimes shape itself suddenly in his mind. 
Thoughts come to him more and more freely, at 
odd moments ; and sometimes these are the best 
he gets, as Goethe said that his best thoughts 
came : ' like singing birds, the free children of 
God, crying ' here we are ! ' ' Of course this is 
not confined to one who preaches without notes. 
It is true also of one who is closely engaged in 



40 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

preparing a manuscript. But I think this habit 
of mind is more common where one meditates 
subjects without dependence on pencil or pen. 
Certainly I know that such thoughts now come 
to me oftener than they did when I always had a 
manuscript lying in the study, impatient to be 
finished.* 

But, on the other hand, whatever of time and 
of force is saved, in these ways or in others, 
must only be more carefully devoted to the com- 
plete conscious mastery of the subject which one 
intends to present, if he is to speak without notes ; 
so that he knows it thoroughly, has searched it 
through, is vitally charged with it, and has it 
fully and vividly in mind. This is absolutely in- 
dispensable to any real success in presenting it 
to others ; and this implies a concentrated, con- 
tinuous, intense action of your mind upon it, — 
more so, I think, than you would ordinarily give if 
writing upon it. One does not usually, I suspect, 
get his whole plan, in all its bearings, fully in 

* Note I. 



MORE VITAL FORCE EXPENDED. 41 

mind, before the process of writing begins. But 
he must do this before he speaks, if he is to 
speak with any proper success. 

Then, for a long time, one must expect a 
degree of mental excitement, and of consequent 
mental exhaustion, in uttering his sermon, when 
preaching without notes, which does not attend 
the reading of a manuscript. At the outset, at 
any rate, the reader has much the easier task in 
the matter of delivery. Having read his sermon, 
of thirty-five or forty minutes, he is generally 
fresh enough to read it again, if there were occa- 
sion. It is far more exhausting to speak the same 
thoughts, with no notes before you. Much more 
of vital force goes out, in the rapid and continuing 
action of all your powers on what you are saying. 
But, remember, that here is a recompense as well 
as a demand. For this essential vital force, going 
forth on one's speech, is that which makes words 
life and spirit. It is, under God, the converting 
force, which quickens, sways, inspires those to 
whom it is sent, as thought alone can never do. 



42 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

It is the power which God employs as His great 
moral instrument in the world. 

Such abundant and careful preliminary prep- 
aration, and such a vital absorption of the mind 
in the subject while preaching, are needed to 
conciliate the attention, the respect, the confi- 
dence of your hearers. They will be repulsed, 
and with reason, you will lose all your hold on 
them — they will swiftly antagonize you, with 
indifference or hostility — if they come to sus- 
pect that you are simply shirking labor in 
preaching without writing. This is in fact 
one chief reason, their suspicion of this, why 
people are often uneasy and restless under 
such preaching. My father was a clergyman 
of the old school, accustomed always to write 
for the pulpit with studious care. He was 
ready, free, eloquent in speech, in the lecture- 
room, or on the platform. Some of the most 
stirring and animating addresses that I ever 
heard from human lips I have heard from him, 
in small assemblies, on special occasions. But I 



BEATEN OIL. 43 



think that to the end of his life he always wrote 
every word of all his sermons ; and, for a long 
time, he looked with great distrust on my pre- 
ferred method of preaching. One of his remarks 
was, frequently repeated : " My son, I was early 
taught that I must bring beaten oil into the 
sanctuary ; " and I never could persuade him that 
there was any better way of beating it than by 
using a pen for a spoon ! So, for years, after I 
was much in the habit of preaching without notes 
at home, I always carried written sermons to 
Brain tree, and read them, as well as I could, in 
his pulpit. 

It happened, however, on a special occa- 
sion, that he was very desirous that I should 
preach when I had no manuscript with me. I 
was obliged to take, therefore, the same method 
to which I had been accustomed at home ; and 
having, as far as I could, charged my mind with 
the subject, I spoke without notes. After that, 
he would never let me do any thing else, when I 
preached for him. He saw that the subject had 



44 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

been carefully considered ; that the sermon was 
not being hastily manufactured, on the spot, but 
was the result of serious preceding reflection 
and study : and that was all that he needed to 
know. Then, he yielded to the influence of the 
freer and more forceful spontaneous utterance, 
and even regretted that he had not himself 
adopted the same method, earlier in life. So, 
you see, Gentlemen, I have made at least one 
convert ! 

Such persistent and strenuous mental exer- 
tion on your subjects is needful, too, to your own 
mind, to discipline, widen, invigorate that, and 
make it fit to master themes, and speak to men. 
Whoever has thoroughly mastered one subject, 
will thereby be fitted to grapple others : but a 
kind of general mental flabbiness is the sure re- 
sult of any let-up from austere and exacting men- 
tal discipline. Never suffer yourselves, there- 
fore, to speak, as Strafford said, ' from the teeth, 
outward.' Your speech will certainly become 
stale, flat, and unprofitable, if you do. Conceive 



HABIT OF WRITING. 45 

your subject clearly, get hold of it firmly, let 
your mind be thoroughly charged and vitalized 
with the proper force of it ; let the sentiment 
which it inspires, and the action which it 
prompts, allure, incite, possess your souls ; and 
then speak, out of the fulness of your mind, 
with a heart w T armed by the truth you have 
considered, and which you now are eager to 
present. 

And, Secondly : Always be careful to keep up 
the habit of writing, with whatever of skill, 
elega?zce, and force, you can command. 

You will need this for the enlarging and 
refining of your vocabulary, if for nothing else. 
Without it, you will almost certainly fall into the 
habit of using cheap and common words ; and 
of using even these with only a rough approxi- 
mation to their meaning, with no subtle or pre- 
cise discrimination between them. Mr. Choate 
once said to one of his students : " You don't 
want a diction gathered from the newspapers, 
caught from the air, common and unsuggestive ; 



4-6 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

but you want one whose every word is full- 
freighted with suggestion and association, with 
beauty and power." * Some words contain a 
whole history in themselves. Panic, — it carries 
us back to the day of Marathon. Panegyric, Pas- 
quinade — there are multitudes of such words, 
opulent, microcosmic, in which histories are 
imaged, which record civilizations. Others recall 
to us great passages of eloquence, or of noble 
poetry, and bring in their train the whole splen- 
dor of such passages, when they are uttered. f 

We cannot be always using such words. The 
plainer are better, for common service. But 
when these richer, remoter words, come into the 
discourse, they make it ample and royal. They 
are like glistening threads of gold, interwoven 
with the commoner tissue. There is a certain 
spell in them, for the memory, the imagination. 
Elect hearers will be warmed and won by them. 
But we cannot get such words, and keep them, 

* Parker's Reminiscences : p. 249. 
t Note II. 



FORMATION OF SENTENCES. 47 

except by writing. Reading will put them into 
our hands. Only careful writing separates, sig- 
nalizes, infixes them in the mind, makes them 
our possession forever. We pass over them, as 
we read. We pick them out, with the pen.* 

So always be careful to write, habitually : not 
sermons, necessarily ; essays, analyses, articles 
for papers, lectures if you like — whatever most 
attracts you to the use of the pen. 

You will need the constant discipline of such 
writing to enable you to form sentences rapidly 
and securely, — sentences which shall be firm, 
well-proportioned, consistent, complete. Noth- 
ing is more absolutely fatal to the impression of 
a spoken discourse than a succession of halting 
broken-backed sentences. They are like broken- 
winged birds, hindering the flight of the whole 
flock ; almost like broken rails on the track, 
which fling the entire train into a heap. When 
subject and predicate, protasis and apodosis, are 
jumbled together in inextricable confusion, or 

* Notes III. and IV. 



48 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

are hopelessly disjointed from each other, no 
one will long try to follow the speaker. At the 
beginning of every sentence one should be able 
to look to the end of it, that he himself may be 
carried on, and his hearers with him, with ease 
and steadiness, to its foreseen conclusion. 

Not all men have the wit and wisdom of 
Father Taylor, the famous preacher to sailors in 
Boston. It is told of him that once getting 
involved in a sentence, where clause after clause 
had been added to each other, and one had 
branched off in this direction and another in 
that, till he was hopelessly entangled, and the 
starting point was quite out of sight, he paused, 
and shook himself free of the perplexity by 
saying : " Brethren, I don't know exactly where 
I went in, in beginning this sentence ; and I 
don't in the least know where I'm coming out ; 
but one thing I do know, I'm bound for the 
kingdom of Heaven ! " So he took a wholly 
new departure, and left the broken-backed centi- 
pede of a sentence lying where it might, in the 



THE DISCIPLINE OF WRITING. 49 

track behind him. Perhaps that is as good a 
way as any of getting out of such confusion, if 
one ever is caught in it. But it is better never 
to be so caught. Father Taylor himself could 
not have repeated the experiment often. 

Sentences may be either long or short, simple 
or complex, but they should always be essen- 
tially periodic, having a beginning, a middle, and 
an end ; and the habit of forming them easily, 
naturally, comes with the diligent use of the pen.* 

One needs too this discipline of careful writ- 
ing to systematize his thoughts ; to make his 
analysis of subjects, or his arrangement of argu- 
ments, clear, enlightening, satisfactory. 

Without this, he will be constantly in danger 
of falling into the habit of loose, vague, ineffect- 
ual thinking, — if it can be called thinking, at 
all — with no sharpness, or system, or synthesis 
in it. The pen gives march to the mind. It 
teaches exactness, discrimination, and helps 
the whole constructive faculty. It is a great 

* Note V. 



50 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

educator. Better give up half your library than 
let the pen fall into disuse. In fact your library 
will lose more than half its value, unless you 
use the pen to represent and preserve the results 
of your reading. You must not fumble over 
subjects, but grasp them ; not glance at them, 
but resolve them : and the pen is the instrument 
with which to do it. 

Dr. Charming has some admirable words on 
the benefits of composition to the writer himself, 
which I will read if you allow me — though I 
know how hazardous it is to introduce his pol- 
ished periods into the midst of a talk like this. 
He says : " We doubt whether a man ever brings 
his faculties to bear with their whole force on a 
subject, until he writes upon it. . . . By attempt- 
ing to seize his thoughts, and fix them in an 
enduring form, he finds them vague and unsatis- 
factory, to a degree which he did not suspect, 
and toils for a precision and harmony of views, 
of which he never before felt the need. He 
places his subject in new lights ; submits it to a 



BENEFIT OF COMPOSITION. 5 I 



searching analysis ; compares and connects it 
with his various knowledge ; seeks for it new 
illustrations and analogies; weighs objections; 
and, through these processes, often arrives at 
higher truths than he at first aimed to illus- 
trate. Dim conceptions grow bright. Glorious 
thoughts, which had darted as meteors through 
the mind, are arrested, and gradually shine with 
a sun-like splendor, with prolific energy, on the 
intellect and heart. . . . Even when composition 
yields no such fruits, it is still a great intellectual 
help. It always favors comprehensive and sys- 
tematical views. The laborious distribution of 
a great subject, so as to assign to each part or 
topic its just position and due proportion, is 
singularly fitted to give compass and persevering 
force of thought." * 

There is profound truth in these words. They 
ought to be always borne in mind by one who is 
training himself to speak without notes He 
must discipline his mind by the use of the pen, 

* Channing's Works, vol. i. pp. 263, 264. 



52 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

that the thoughts which subsequently rise to his 
lips may be sound and clear, and worth the 
uttering. Nothing but the pen can break up 
books for us, and transmute them into personal 

knowledge and thought.* 

And further, Thirdly : Be perfectly frank 
with your people in regard to this matter of your 
method of preaching ; so patting yourselves at 
once in right relations with them about it. 

Let them know that you design to preach 
without notes, and without memorizing the ser- 
mon ; and give them your reasons. Tell them 
that you have the strongest conviction that your 
business in the pulpit is not to read essays, but 
to fill your mind with clear, profound, quicken- 
ing impressions of those sublime truths which 
the Gospel reveals, and then to declare these 
to the congregation, as the Spirit of God shall 
give you utterance. Ask them to bear with 
you, if at first you seem to fail to do justice to 
your subject, or to your own thought of it ; and 

* Note VI. 



ONE SOURCE OF DIFFICULTY. 53 

to wait with patience until you are stronger, and 
are able more fully to instruct and inspire them, 
for the worship of God. So you will have a 
free field for your effort, and be unembarrassed 
by their reluctance or their surprise. 

Many eminent clergymen speak admirably in 
the lecture-room, or on the platform, who are 
abashed and disconcerted in the pulpit, if they 
have not a manuscript, because of their con- 
sciousness that there the people expect this. 

The best debater whom I ever heard among 
American ministers — if I should mention his 
name all who know him would assent to the 
praise — once told me that he never felt at ease 
in the pulpit without notes before him, because 
his people were accustomed to these, and would 
feel, in the absence of them, that his preparation 
had been incomplete, and that the service was 
insufficient. A very eminent clergyman of this 
city, who sustains important relations to this 
institution, has told me the same thing, in sub- 
stance, of himself, within a few weeks. With all 



54 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

his culture, all his power, and all the prestige 
given by many honorable years of Christian ser- 
vice, — though speaking on the platform with 
ease, elegance, and continual success, — it has 
always been an awkward thing to him to stand 
in his pulpit without a manuscript. Even Dr. 
Bethune — wonderfully free, versatile, engaging, 
impressive, as he was, in almost all forms of 
public address — I think invariably took notes 
with him to the pulpit : that even if he did not 
use them he might have them on the desk, open 
before him. 

The sympathies of a congregation are ex- 
tremely swift and subtle. If a few are surprised, 
disappointed, restless, when they see you in the 
pulpit without a manuscript, if they turn away 
as careless of your words and expectant of fail- 
ure, the feeling will propagate itself rapidly and 
far ; and to speak freely, with self-possession, in 
the face of such indifference or distrust, will be 
very difficult. It is like trying to laugh aloud in 
a vacuum. You want the interest on the part 



NEED OF SYMPATHY. 55 

of your people, to stimulate your powers. You 
want the quickening warmth cf sympathy. One 
does see, I know, roses and pinks blooming on 
the terraces around Genoa in the month of 
December, with ice near them, half-an-inch 
thick, on the basins of fountains. But that has 
always seemed to me an almost unaccountable 
physical fact. And certainly the mind will not 
germinate and bloom in an atmosphere full of 
icy indifference. The spirit of the speaker will 
inevitably be affected by the doubt and disap- 
pointment which encircle and chill him. He will 
begin to hesitate, because he is thus hindered ; 
and very likely will begin, before many minutes, 
to feel his heart beat, and his unsustained head 
reel and swim. When that comes to pass he 
had better sit down. 

It is far better to avoid such manacles and 
miseries at the very start, by putting yourself on 
your feet and at ease with your people at once, 
through their thorough understanding of what 
you mean to do, and of the reasons which move 



56 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

you to do it. Let it be distinctly understood by 
them that at one of the services, at least — the 
morning, I think, being usually the better — 
you will preach without notes. Then you won't 
have to contend, at any rate, against their disap- 
pointment. The difficulties you meet afterward 
will be only intrinsic, and not adventitious. And 
that of itself will be a great gain. 

And Fourthly : Discharge your mind of the 
sermon when once you have preached it ; so keep- 
ing the mind free and open for other subjects 
succeeding that one. 

I cannot give you any rule by which to do 
this. I only know that it can be done, though it 
is not easy ; that the habit of doing it can be 
formed, like the habit of dining at a certain 
hour, or of walking at a certain pace, or like any 
other habit which we make for ourselves. And 
I know that it is indispensable to one who would 
speak energetically, usefully, without help from 
his notes. 

The lawyer does it, all the time. All sorts of 



CHANGE OF SUBJECTS. 57 

cases come successively before him, and each, in 
its turn, fully occupies his mind : cases of in- 
surance ; cases involving felony — murder, theft, 
forgery, barratry, libel, or what not ; cases of 
patent-rights ; cases involving the title to lands ; 
horse-cases, perhaps. While he is arguing one, 
his thoughts are full of it. The next eliminates 
it wholly from his mind ; and the one is for- 
gotten when the other is before him. 

A minister must learn to do much the same 
thing. It is not easy, as I said. I used to be 
more embarrassed at this point than at almost 
any other. But I found that one great secret of 
success in doing what was needed was to take a 
second subject very different from the first : 
then the expulsive power of the new subject, oc- 
cupying the thoughts, freed them from embar- 
rassing reminiscences of the other. If you have 
preached on a theme of doctrine, for example, 
in the morning, take some point of Christian 
practice for your theme in the evening. If 
one discourse is preceptive and hortatory, let 



58 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

another be narrative, in its structure. If one is 
closely argumentative, let the next be a careful 
yet free exposition of a parable or a psalm. So 
you will find that the mind releases itself from 
the one subject, by taking another entirely dis- 
tinct ; its natural resilience is helped and stimu- 
lated, and you cease to be weighted with your 
previous processes. 

In this way, or some other, you must secure 
the result which I indicate. Otherwise, you will 
be all the while in danger of repeating preced- 
ing trains of thought, of applying the intellec- 
tual methods proper to one subject to another 
widely different, and of wholly failing to widen 
and enrich your mind. You will be likely, even, 
to get 1)\' degrees a set of pet subjects, of recur- 
ring phrases, and of familiar illustrations ; and 
to feel yourself, and to make your people feel as 
well, that your mind is becoming narrow and 
unproductive through your method of preaching. 
Applying the same general modes of treatment 
to all sorts of subjects, and getting the subjects 



PRACTICE OF "EVANGELISTS." 59 

themselves continually mixed and tangled in 
your thoughts, your whole force will dwindle. 

The " evangelists " of forty years ago were 
accustomed to get a set of sermons — enough 
perhaps for four or six weeks of daily preaching 
— and then to go from place to place delivering 
these. They investigated no fresh subjects, but 
repeated the discourses which they had prepared, 
over and over. The result was that the first 
impression made by them was always vivid and 
energetic ; but they became less convincing and 
powerful as they went on, till at last their minds 
were as dull and flameless as a burnt cinder. 
They were some of them powerful men, in their 
day : but their very names are now almost for- 
gotten ; and those who continued in that form of 
service left no more impression of themselves 
on the religious thought of the country, or on its 
theological literature, than a bird's wing leaves 
on the air. 

You must keep the mind fresh and hospitable 
for new subjects, keep it all the time alert and 



60 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

advancing, if you are to preach without a manu- 
script with any success. Each sermon must 
have its own vitality, and stand apart from every 
other. You must be as free in discussing each 
succeeding subject as you were in treating the 
one before ; and in order to this the sermon once 
preached must be thereafter wholly and swiftly 
discharged from the thoughts. 

There is a certain disadvantage here, or what 
may appear such, in preaching without notes. 
It relates to exchanges of your pulpit for others. 
When one writes his sermons, an exchange of 
pulpits means a week's or a half-week's less work 
in the year. The sermons already prepared are 
at hand ; and the principal duty is to read them. 
On the other hand, one often finds quite as 
much difficulty, I do not know but more, in 
re-charging the mind with a previous sermon, 
to be preached in exchange, than he did in pre- 
paring it at the outset, if there exists no manu- 
script of it. To re-absorb is harder than to 
produce. It is more difficult in preaching it the 



THE MATTER OF EXCHANGES. 6 1 

second time to keep the recollective force of 
the mind in abeyance, and to let the construct- 
ive, creative forces freely work. I confess that 
to this day an exchange of pulpits rather dis- 
mays me. I should always prefer to stay at 
home. 

However, one can acquire more and more 
facility in doing this ; and he will always find 
that the more vitally, thoroughly, he fills his 
mind with the subject which he treats, at home 
or abroad, the more effective he is in preaching. 
So I don't think that there is here any real dis- 
advantage, except to the lazy. I verily believe, 
Young Gentlemen, that the kingdom of God 
advances more on spoken words than it does 
on essays written and read ; on words, that is, 
in which the present feeling and thought of the 
teaching mind break into natural and forceful 
expression. There is always reward, therefore, 
as well as work, in fitting oneself for performing 
this office ; and the work itself should only be to 
us an incentive. 



62 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

Fifthly : Never be discouraged by what seems 
to you, perJiaps to others, comparative failure. 

Such failure occurs everywhere. Lawyers 
lose cases, and physicians lose patients. Even 
editors, it is said, sometimes write articles that 
are not absolutely brilliant and powerful, up to 
the line of their highest capacity. The painter 
fails to secure a good portrait, though he has 
such a subject as Gerrit Smith or Charlotte 
Cushman. The architect's mind gets into a 
cramp, and he can do nothing in planning the 
building to his own satisfaction. Men who 
write sermons fail, at times, as well as those who 
preach without notes. They write in a languid 
and inert state ; they quarrel with the discourses 
while they preach them ; very likely they burn 
them when they are done. My father once 
burned four hundred at a flash ; and I always 
honored him for it. 

So don't be discouraged, as if it were a thing 
that never happened to any other sort of work- 
man, if you fail in your effort when treating a 



FINE PROCESSES INEFFECTIVE. 63 

subject without a manuscript. It is not impos- 
sible that what seems to you failure may appear 
quite otherwise to your people. They may be 
most impressed by that with which you are most 
discontented. The train of thought which had 
interested your mind, but which would not come 
back while you were speaking, would have been 
too subtle and refined for your hearers. The 
commoner thoughts which you were obliged to 
substitute for it reached some of them more 
effectively. The fine processes, in which you had 
rejoiced but which you forgot, would have been 
too delicate. The bolder broad-axe style of 
treatment, to which you resorted but of which 
you were ashamed, did better service. The 
most numerous and inspiriting echoes often 
come back from what you esteemed your poor- 
est work : and you find to your surprise that 
hearts were comforted, despondencies were dis- 
pelled, faltering wills received fresh impulse, 
from the very sermon which to you appeared a 
perfect failure.* 

* Note VII. 



64 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

At any rate remember this : that your busi- 
ness is to do the best you can in the preaching 
of the Gospel, every time you stand in the pul- 
pit ; and if you are conscious that you have 
done that, before the sermon and in the sermon, 
then let that suffice. If you feel that you have 
failed of the success which you hoped for, if 
disparaging remarks come back to you from 
others, be never discouraged ; and certainly 
never get morbid about it. " In your patience 
possess ye your souls : " if your Greek Professor 
will allow the translation, ' by your endurance, 
get full possession, and perfect mastery, of your 
own souls.' That is the first step toward get- 
ting an equal mastery over others. " Quit you 
like men ; be strong." " Forgetting the things 
which are behind, reach forth " — stretch forth, 
bending forward, as the racer toward the goal — 
unto those which are before. 

Remember the pains men take to train them- 
selves in other and lower departments of effort, 
and be ashamed if you are not willing to give to 



SELF-DISCIPLINE PROPER. 65 

this grandest office on earth the labor and self- 
discipline which are needed for success in it. I 
see the athlete, the gymnast, the rope-walker, 
the man who is to swing upon the trapeze, 
developing each muscle, giving every nerve its 
fitting training, for the feats they accomplish, 
until the results are simply amazing; I remem- 
ber the tough pugilistic expression which Paul 
employs, " I keep under the body," vTtcomd'Ca, — 
I beat it black and blue, if needful — and bring 
it to subjection ; and then I think with shame 
how few and slight, in comparison are the 
efforts which we make for success in our call- 
ing. I remember a sword-dance which I once 
saw at Wiirzburg, in Bavaria, performed by some 
Arabian gymnasts, leaping over and among the 
gleaming, sharp, and cruel blades which would 
have instantly drunk the life from you or me, 
but amid which they lightly sprang and danced, 
as if they had been stalks of thistle ; and I say 
to myself, and repeat it to you, ' How ready 
should we be to give ourselves a training for 



66 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

our work as much more exact and thorough 
than theirs as our work is more important ! ' * 

If you do this, in the final result you will not 
fail ; and if, in your preliminary efforts, you now 
and then do fail, be never discouraged. Make 
the failure a reason for more intense succeeding 
effort ; a wing, not a weight ; a spur, to stimu- 
late to fresh endeavor, and not a stiletto, to stab 
out the life ! 

But, Finally, Gentlemen : Do no violence to 
your own nature; — and if you find, after suffi- 
cient conscientious trial, that you can do more 
useful service with the pen than without it, then 
use the pen, without reluctance, without reserve, 
and be thankful that you have it. 

There are some men, no doubt, who can never 
acquire complete self-possession in presence of 
an audience, so as to be at ease and in vigor 
when addressing large numbers face to face. 
They are fewer, I am confident, than is commonly 
supposed. But there are some such ; who can 
* Note VIII. 



USE OF THE PEN. 6? 

hardly, at any rate, prepare themselves for this 
office without such a martyrdom as they are not 
called to ; while the same men may be swift, 
bold, powerful, with the pen, and in reading their 
writings may be very effective. It would be a 
wanton waste of time, if not indeed a sin against 
nature, for such men to give up their notes in 
the pulpit. They ought to use them, and to be 
grateful to God for this means of usefulness. 
The pen is a prodigious power in the world ; an 
invincible moral and social force ; a real lever 
to lift the race, forward. It has blessed all times, 
since man first discovered the use of the alphabet. 
God Himself has put honor upon it, in writing 
His law on tables of stone, and not merely speak- 
ing it in articulate tones. He has honored it in 
the gospels, preserving by it the words of His 
Son. Any man should be glad and proud to use 
it, for Him from whom the power comes. 

I have never believed it the best plan for all 
ministers to preach without notes. I only think 
it better for some. And my remarks, now and 



68 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

hereafter, are intended only for those among you 
who think that it may be better for them. If 
you think so, I shall be delighted to say any 
word that may help you in your effort. For really 
I think the work you contemplate as great a 
work as ever is given to men on earth : to bring 
Divine truths, with earnest utterance, to human 
souls. Never look upon your congregation as so 
many * cabbage-heads,' as some one has inconsid- 
erately said, but always look on them as immor- 
tal intelligences, each one of whom shall live 
forever ! and then bring all the power you can to 
urge them to righteousness, through thoughtful, 
fervent, inspiring speech. It is the noblest of 
human errands. Whether, therefore, you do 
your work with notes or without them, do it 
courageously, earnestly, with devotion ; with a 
glad sense of the greatness of it, and a full con- 
secration of every force and faculty to it. 

If I might change one letter in a precept of 
St. Paul, I should say : " One man estcemeth one 
way above another ; another man esteemeth 



THE WORK NOBLE. 69 

every way alike. Let every man be fully per- 
suaded in his own mind." And whichever way you 
finally select, strive always to be able to say: 
" Whether we live, we live unto the Lord ; a,nd 
whether we die, we die unto the Lord. Whether 
we live, therefore, or die, we are the Lord's." 

Working for the Master in this high spirit, 
the work which you do will be always noble ; and 
the reward which comes after it will be sure, 
and immortal! 



SECOND LECTURE. 



Mr. President : Young Gentlemen : — 

I am very happy to meet you here again, — the 
more so, as an hour ago, while I was drifting 
about the Bay, I thought it very doubtful if I 
should be able to meet you at all. The fact is 
that you people who live on the wrong side of 
the East River are apt to get zsolated — if 
you will pardon the pronunciation — in such 
weather as this ; and we, who live where we 
ought to, find it hard work to get to you. 

I ought perhaps, to add, before beginning 

upon my subject this afternoon, that I have 

been occupied, to-day, before leaving home, with 

some of those sad and exacting duties of which 

every minister meets so many, which for the 

time wholly occupy his mind, and draw largely 
70 



SPEAKING TO STUDENTS. J I 

upon his sympathies ; so that you may find me, 
I fear, even less prepared than I should otherwise 
have been to speak to you on the theme before 
us. I shall trust to your kindness to excuse the 
defects which you may observe. 

I am again surprised by finding present not 
only the students of this institution, to whom, as 
being younger than myself, I had thought it pos- 
sible that I might say something which should be 
of more or less service in their coming work, but 
also these distinguished men — Professors, Pas- 
tors, Secretaries, Editors, Presidents of Colleges, 
Lawyers, Teachers, and eminent Merchants, 
whom I have not come prepared to address. I 
can only say that when I am invited to breakfast 
or lunch I do not go dressed for an evening din- 
ner-party ; and when I am asked to speak to 
students, who may not know even as much as 
myself, I do not prepare myself to speak to 
others who know much more. I long ago found 
out that when a Committee ask one to 'make a 
few remarks,' what they mean is ' an address of 



72 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

half-an-hour.' But I certainly thought that I was 
perfectly safe in literally accepting the kind invi- 
tation of these Professors and Doctors of Divin- 
ity, and coming to speak to students only. 

At any rate, I shall stick to the programme, 
and " talk," as I intended, without attempting 
any studied and elaborate address, suitable for 
these gentlemen accomplished in their professions. 

Let me say, still further, that after my rapid 
talk of last week I was pursued with the fear 
that I must have seemed egotistical in it ; as if 
I quite over-estimated the consequence of what- 
ever experience I have had, in the matter of 
preaching without my notes. I hope, however, 
that you did me the justice to look at the thing 
from my point of view, and to recognize the fact 
that I said what I did only because it seemed 
inevitable, as laying the basis for my subsequent 
suggestions ; and, also, as illustrating the fact 
that there was nothing whatever exceptional in 
my case ; that the change in my method was not 
a sudden one ; that whatever I have done in this 



SPECIFIC CONDITIONS OF SUCCESS. 73 



direction has been only the result of continuous 
effort, and that anybody else who wishes to do it, 
and is willing to work for it, can do as much : 
— some of you, I am sure, can do much more, as 
I sincerely hope that you will. 

Now for what I have principally to say to-day. 
After the preliminary suggestions which I 
made last week I propose to present to you cer- 
tain specific conditions of success — or what I 
esteem such — in the work of preaching without 
one's notes. First I shall speak of those which 
are especially physical and mental, and after- 
ward of those which are moral and spiritual. 
Those of the latter class I shall hope to present 
next week. Of those of the former class I shall 
speak to-day. Some of them are essential ; all 
of them are important ; and in the absence of 
any one of them, the highest success can hardly, 
I think, be ever realized. 

Before proceeding to consider them, however, 
one by one, let me say in general, as preliminary 
to every thing which is to follow, that I assume, 



74 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

as an essential pre-requisite to all such success, 
a serious, devout, intelligent, inspiring conviction 
of the Divine origin and authority of the Gospel, 
and of its transcendent importance to men. — 
This is a fundamental condition, indispensable to 
every thing else ; and without it no instruction 
or rule that I know of can be of real service to 
any preacher. 

Of course, this is not merely a condition to 
success in preaching without a manuscript. It 
is a condition to such success in preaching in 
any way, either with notes or without them. No 
man can hope to accomplish results, permanent 
and fruitful, in the work of the ministry, unless 
this conviction is in his mind, radicated there, 
ruling over his thoughts, inspiring him to con- 
stant endeavors, and kindling in him a constant 
enthusiasm. 

It is difficult to see, indeed, why a man without 
this should ever enter the ministry at all, as long 
as bread and meat can be won in other reputable 
ways. His work must be an immensely hard 



FAITH IN THE GOSPEL, NEEDFUL. 75 

one, and its pull upon him must be very exhaust- 
ing. For a man in preaching has not only to 
give sermons, grammatically composed, but in 
order to render effective service he must speak, 
or must seem to speak, from the heart ; and if 
one has not the love of the Gospel enthroned in 
his heart the work must draw with prodigious 
force on all his nature, mental and moral, while 
the reward for it can never be large. Such a 
one will almost certainly be soon introducing 
some novelty of doctrine, to refresh his mind with 
what enlists his conviction, or what at least is 
attractive to his thought. He will tend more 
and more to become a mere teacher of natural 
ethics, or of social philosophy ; and after a while 
will be likely to leave the ministry altogether. 

A man must have faith in God's authorship 
of the Gospel, and in its importance to man's 
well-being, in order to impulse and success in 
proclaiming it. This is necessary, if for no 
other reason, that he himself may understand 
his proper function and errand in the world; 



y6 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

that he may recognize himself as essentially a 
herald — fcrjpv^, krjpvaaoi — proclaiming the glad 
tidings of God to mankind. He is not sent to 
be an ingenious and eloquent sophist, inventing 
theories of his own, or accepting the theories 
invented by others. He is to bring to men the 
wisdom which God has first revealed to him in 
His word, — accepting, pondering, absorbing that, 
in his own mind, and then declaring it vividly 
to others, through character and through speech. 
So his office becomes a grand one : unique, in 
fact, among the offices accomplished by man. 
So he is brought into intimate communion with 
the mind of the Most High. Strength of pur- 
pose, expectation of success, and a serene fear- 
lessness, become the very prerogatives of his 
office, when he stands to represent the King of 
the world, in uttering His messages to the men 
of the world.* 

The same conviction of the Divine origin and 
authority of the Gospel, and of its infinite im- 

* Note IX. 



ENTHUSIASM KINDLED. JJ 

portance to man, is needed to help one in medi- 
tating his subject, as well as in presenting it. It 
will quicken him in his study, as well as in the 
pulpit, if he understands that his business is, in 
investigating the word, to ascertain what the 
thought of God is, as therein set forth, and then 
to present it — while gathering around it all the 
lights of reflection and scholarship, that he may 
make it most evident and lucent, and in its 
presentation most commanding and attractive. 
This will lift him to higher levels of thought, 
and lead him out into widest ranges of inquiry 
and study. It will draw forth and stimulate 
each power within him, that he may apprehend 
what the Author of the Gospel would have him 
speak, and may speak it in a manner most per- 
tinent and persuasive. 

It will kindle his enthusiasm, and help him 
in even the delivery of his message, making 
him courageous, and setting him free from all 
bondage to circumstances, however embarrassing 
these may be. We hear a great deal said, in 



78 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

these clays, about awkward pulpits ; how high 
they often are, how narrow, how restraining*. 
There is something in it. They are often very 
awkward ; and I criticise no one who prefers a 
plain desk, on an open stage, to one of those 
embattled boxes into which a minister some- 
times is put. I would certainly rather myself 
stand here, and speak to you from this platform, 
than attempt to do it from the pulpit behind me : 
though we all have seen those which were far 
worse than that. 

I remember, years ago, when I was settled at 
Brookline, an excellent minister, now deceased, 
who was then a somewhat distinguished man, 
came one Sunday to preach for me. He was 
shorter than I was, and I therefore thought 
that he might like the desk lowered, on which 
the sermon was to lie, and suggested this 
to him. But he said, No ; and it remained as 
it was. I found afterward that he was short- 
sighted, and yet preferred to use no glasses : so 
the manuscript must be brought as closely as 



A PULPIT BARRICADE. 79 

possible to his eye. Instead of lowering the 
desk, he raised it still higher, as high as it 
would go. He then closed the Bible, which had 
lain open upon it. He placed a hymn-book on 
that ; another hymn-book on that ; a pile of ser- 
mons, a dozen I should think, on the top of 
that ; and then the sermon which he was to 
read, surmounting the whole. When the whole 
structure had been erected, he was left standing 
behind it, and just able »to look over it, while the 
congregation could see almost nothing of him 
but the top of his head. Then he read his text, 
as his custom was, without first naming its 
place in the Scripture ; and the text proved to 
be : " Ye shall see greater things than these ! " 
It was a serious service, and a devout congrega- 
tion ; but the smile that rippled round the room, 
if not quite as loud as this of yours, was quite 
as instant and universal. 

Any man may be pardoned for not desiring a 
breast-work like that, between him and the 
people. But if one is penetrated, is essentially 



80 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

imbued, with the thorough conviction that the 
message which he brings is a message from God, 
and that it is vital to man's well-being, it will not 
make much difference to him where he preaches. 
Even such a barricade could not hinder his ut- 
terance. He will preach on the swinging deck 
of a ship, so long as he is not sea-sick ; on the 
stump, around which the pioneers gather ; on a 
box, at the street-corner ; if need be, from the 
' Devil's pulpit,' on Monument Mountain. He 
will be at home in whatever circumstances, if 
this conviction really fills him, that the word 
which he preaches is God's word to man.* 

Some one has said that " no faculty of the 
mind is weak which has heart in it." Certainly 
it is true that no faculty is strong which has not 
heart in it ; and whoever addresses men has to 
learn the lesson. If one is to speak on Sanitary 
Reform, he needs the underlying sense of the 
greatness of the interest of public health, and of 
the importance of the measures which he advo- 

* Note X. 



UNDERTONE OF SERMONS. 8 1 

cates to the maintenance of that health. If he 
is to speak for the maintenance and the further- 
ance of International Peace, he needs to feel how 
vast are its blessings, and how tremendous the 
miseries and sins which it displaces, the moral 
decadence which it will arrest. 

So, and still more, if he speaks of the Gospel, 
he must feel how glorious that is in itself, and 
how adapted to man's vast need. This must be 
the undertone of every sermon ; like the 
golden ground on which the angels of Fra An- 
gelico walk and worship. The conviction of it 
must be as a sun-gleam, smiting his mind, and 
quickening to activity all its beauty and all its 
force. If he has not this, his thought will in- 
evitably be obscure, his feeling dull, his utter- 
ance wanting in the elements of power. A 
deist, a fatalist, a materialist, a sceptic of what- 
ever sort, undertaking as a business to preach 
the Gospel, will inevitably be like a blind man 
discoursing on the splendors of light, and the 
charming and delicate interplay of colors ; or 



82 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 



like a deaf man, describing oratorios. Every 
one who loves the Gospel will see that he is 
speaking theoretically, in the way of imitation, 
from report of others, and not from real and rich 
experience. So his words will want fire. They 
will stir no emotion, and touch no heart. They 
will be like a smile, in which the lips laugh, 
while the rest of the face is harsh and sullen. 

In order then that a man may have this con- 
viction, pervading his mind — that the Gospel is 
God's word to the world, and that he is but a 
herald sent to proclaim it — that he may enter 
into this high enthusiasm, and keep his spirit 
glowing with it, he should meditate much on the 
facts which prove God's authorship of the Scrip- 
ture : on the amazing unity of the Bible ; on its 
majesty, surpassing all reach of man's thought ; 
on the holiness of its law — a holiness against 
which man's will rebels, and which could not 
have sprung from the nature that resists it ; on 
its perfect adaptation to human wants, its power 
to soothe, to inspire, and to purify, the peace it 



PHYSICAL VIGOR. 83 

gives to the penitent heart, the hope it quick- 
ens in darkest hours, the tranquil courage it 
gives in death. Keep your minds under the 
manifold proofs of God's authorship of the Gos- 
pel — proofs which in the aggregate amount to 
demonstration — till the soul is glowing and in- 
candescent with this conviction : that you in 
proclaiming this to men are speaking to them 
the thoughts of the Almighty. The constant 
inspiring force of this will exalt your whole 
ministry. 

Now for the specific conditions of which I am 
to speak, which are important to any man's suc- 
cess who would preach this Gospel without aid 
from notes. 

The First which I mention is : Physical vigor, 
kept at its JiigJiest attainable point. 

You will think that I begin a good way back, 
and so I do ; but this is the under-pinning of 
every thing else, and it must be treated as first 
in order. 

Of course we know that the healthiest men 



84 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

are by no means always the most intellectual. 
It is not necessary that a man should be trained 
like a prize-fighter, in active service, to be a good 
preacher. But the intellectual man is always 
then in the best condition for effective, vigorous, 
sustained mental effort, when his physical vigor 
is most nearly at its height. It is not necessary 
to go into any argument to show this, or care- 
fully to develop the subtle relations between 
physiology and psychology. Experience proves 
it. 

Every student knows, for example, how easy 
and swift mental processes are on some days, 
which on others are tardy and difficult ; because 
in the one case the mind takes vigor from the 
body, and the thoughts go forth refreshed by its 
health, while in the other case there seems to be 
a mist on the brain, from some perturbed state 
of the physical system, or the invisible spiritual 
muscle which holds the mind to a strict and 
searching investigation of subjects has been 
silently relaxed. A clear, crisp morning-air : 



HEALTH, THE BED-PLATE. 85 

how it sets the very soul in a glow, on a day 
like this ! After a brisk and breezy walk, after a 
swim beyond the breakers, after a rapid horseback 
ride — it is astonishing, the swift change which is 
wrought, of mental renewal ; how subjects clear 
up, and faculty is freshened, and we are ready 
for any work. After sound and sufficient sleep, 
we wake in the morning prepared for efforts 
which in the weariness of the preceding evening 
had been simply impossible. Reading, conver- 
sation, public discourse — any thing is then pos- 
sible, the refreshed body lending enterprise to 
the mind. 

This emphasizes the rule that we must main- 
tain, as far as we can, full health of body, if we 
would discourse to men on the themes of the 
Gospel, without help from a manuscript, with 
any success. Such health is the bed-plate, on 
which the whole mental machinery must rest 
and work. If this be cracked, or displaced, all 
the mechanism that stands on it will be jarred 
and disturbed, and made ineffective. You must 



86 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

work the ship after that, if you work it at all, 
with the donkey-engine. 

Such health, indeed, is particularly necessary 
to the rapid, robust, effective working of those 
special faculties which arc always most needed 
in public speech. The judgment, the will, the 
creative imagination, — the power of rapidly 
originating thought, and as rapidly combining 
it in relations with others, — the power of ex- 
pressing it freely and with facility, and so of 
setting forth the subjects which are treated 
in energetic and perspicuous speech : these 
are the powers which the preacher requires, 
if he is to speak without aid from his notes. 
And these are the powers which depend most 
eminently on fulness of health as their condi- 
tion. 

It may not be so with some other faculties. 
The fancy, for instance, may sometimes act 
most rapidly and brilliantly, in connection with 
morbid physical conditions ; as is shown in not 
a few poets and artists, perhaps in some preach- 



GENERAL MENTAL VIGOR. 8? 

ers. The memory will sometimes show abnor- 
mal activity when the brain is in any thing but 
a healthful condition ; and the emotional nature 
is undoubtedly more excitable — though its 
power of propagating emotion in others is not, 
I think, in like measure increased — when the 
body is suffering from a diseased sensibility. 

So it may be with still other faculties. But 
the general and harmonious intellectual vigor, 
whereby one conceives subjects clearly and 
fully, analyzes them rapidly, sets them forth 
with exactness in an orderly presentation, and 
urges them powerfully on those who listen — 
this requires opulence of health; a sustained 
and abounding physical vigor. In the absence 
of this, the power will decline. If the mind 
still works energetically at all, it will do so only 
by jerks, and in spasms, not continuously; will 
do it with particular faculties, not with the con- 
sentaneous and cooperating energy of all its 
powers, working together for a noble result. It 
may surprise men, still ; but it hardly by possi- 
bility will sway and inspire them. 



88 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

A conscious and abundant physical vigor is 
necessary, even, to a fit and impressive delivery 
of one's thoughts. The weak man is apt to 
screech in his utterance, and now and then to 
explode in his tones ; while the strong man 
speaks easily, naturally, without any push of his 
voice by the will. His is a power which comes 
from within, and which manifests itself as 
freely and steadily as the power that moves the 
levers of machinery. 

Indeed, such sound physical health is, directly, 
a positive power to the speaker. It has almost 
a moral force in it. It represents a complete 
development of manhood in him ; and it carries 
men forward, with immediate impulse, on the 
efflux of its force. Webster is the typical illus- 
tration of this among American speakers. The 
vast mass of the man made his words impress- 
ive. As a farmer said of him, after hearing 
one of his brief addresses : " He didn't say very 
much, but every word that he did say weighed 
a pound." He carried men's minds, and over- 



HEALTH, A MORAL FORCE. 89 

whelmingly pressed his thought upon them, with 
the immense current of his physical energy. 
Once in a famous case at Northampton — 
known to the lawyers as the " Smith-will case " 
— where a large property was involved, Mr. 
Webster was employed for the maintenance of 
the will, and Mr. Choate was his antagonist. 
At one point in the progress of the trial Mr. 
Choate quoted a dictum, — from Lord Camden, I 
think it was, — to the effect that a witness to the 
execution of an instrument must be competent 
not only to certify to the fact of the manual 
signature of the person by whom the paper was 
executed, but also to judge of his mental sound- 
ness at the time of his signing it. Mr. Choate 
cited this, in impeachment of one of the wit- 
nesses to the will. Mr. Webster could not 
avoid meeting it. When he came to it he said, 
in substance, as I have been told : ' My learned 
friend has quoted from Lord Camden, to this 
effect ' — (repeating the dictum). ' Gentlemen, 
this means that when you call in one of your 



90 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

farm-hands to witness your signature to a con- 
veyance or a mortgage, he is not merely to see 
you write your name, but he is to be able to look 
into your mind, and see if that is sound and 
discreet ! Lord Camden says that.' Then up 
went his head, and out went his chest : ' Dan- 
iel Webster says that's nonsense.' And so it 
was, for that jury at any rate. 

We cannot certainly be Daniel Websters, 
either physically or mentally. But we may 
attain our fair share of physical vigor, and 
gain the force which comes with that. It is 
especially needful, I think, to the minister. An 
impression sometimes prevails among people 
that religion is good for dyspeptics and invalids, 
for nervous people, and for women ; but that it 
does not suit well with a body full of spirit and 
health. They are apt to expect to find in the 
minister a debilitated student, who does not 
know much of what real and vigorous manhood 
means. His words are for persons like himself ; 
and not for hale men, in an out-door life. A 



THE MINISTER NEEDS IT. 9 1 

full development of vital force, a robust and 
athletic habit of body, if he can gain it, is the 
very best answer to such an idea. Therefore, if 
for this reason only, it is a Christian duty to gain 
it, and to keep our merely physical force at the 
highest point. 

When I was ordained I was in somewhat 
delicate health, not long recovered from a seri- 
ous sickness, thinner and paler than I have 
since been. The "Charge" was given to me by 
a most excellent man, a friend of my father for 
many years, a friend of my own from my boy- 
hood up, to whom I was attached by many 
tender and grateful ties, and whom I had every 
reason to revere. He was a man of very full 
and florid habit, who had not seen his knees, as 
they say, for twenty years ; and as he stood 
speaking on the platform, while I stood listening 
beneath, the contrast between us was undoubt- 
edly striking. It was emphasized, perhaps, to 
some of the congregation, when looking at me 
with tears in his eyes, he said very earnestly : 



92 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

" My young brother, I charge you, Keep under 
the body ! " 

It did seem rather absurd at the time, as an 
address from him to me ; but it was neverthe- 
less a sound, wholesome, apostolic charge. He 
meant what he said ; and I should repeat it on 
every occasion when such a service was com- 
mitted to me. I repeat it to myself to-day, and 
repeat it to you : " Keep under the body." Only 
be careful to give the precept its proper meaning, 
and to obey it in the right sense. Keep under 
the body, as the rider keeps his horse beneath 
him ; as the sailor keeps the deck ; as the 
builder keeps ladder and scaffolding beneath 
him. Keep it in constant subjection to the 
mind. Keep it under, that the whole intellectual 
force may securely rest and rise upon it ; that it 
may be not an opponent of the spirit, but its 
continual supporter and minister. 

In order to this, avail yourselves of all the 
means which experience suggests, your own or 
others'. Leave no means untried, that are apt 



MEANS OF HEALTH. 93 

to the end. Use good, simple, wholesome food, 
and plenty of it. Find out for yourselves what 
food suits you best, and govern yourselves 
accordingly, without reference to the theories of 
other people about it. Take exercise as you 
need it, and physical recreation. Get plenty of 
sleep, and as early as you can. The ' beauty- 
sleep ' of the mind comes generally before mid- 
night. Do your work in the day-time, in the 
sunshine, if possible ; under the light which God 
has given, and not in an artificial blaze. Enjoy 
the intervals of rest and relaxation, as you have 
opportunity, and as you find need.* 

Use every help, which experience indicates 
as reasonable and right, to secure the condi- 
tion, and maintain the condition, of full normal 
physical vigor ; and remember that you are 
responsible to no man for that which you do in 
order to this supreme result. You are respon- 
sible to the Son of God, and to God Himself — 
who has given you the body as the instrument 

* Note XL 



94 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

through which the mind is to work ; who requires 
you to keep it continually attuned for effective 
continuous service. So nourish and train it, to 
the highest point of strength and vigor attain- 
able by you ; and whenever you speak without a 
manuscript you will feel the effect. Force, buoy- 
ancy, elasticity, vigor, will come to the mind 
from the sound and energetic physical force 
which underlies and sustains it. 

And this leads me to say, Secondly : Be very 
sure to keep your mind in a state of Jiabitiial 
activity, alertness, energy ; — so that it will be 
ready to grasp subjects strongly, and to handle 
them with easy and effectual force ; so that 
thoughts shall come to you rapidly when you 
speak, and your freedom in uttering them be 
proportioned to the rapidity with which they 
are suggested. 

Keep the mind up to its highest point. Of 
course we all know the immense differences that 
appear in it, at different times, in regard to that 
dynamic force by which it seizes a subject pre- 



DIFFERENT MENTAL STATES. 95 

sented, opens it rapidly in its parts and relations, 
and sets it forth clearly for others to consider. 
Sometimes it seems impossible to accomplish 
what at other times is easy. Things are dim 
and obscure to us on one day, which on another 
are manifest, vivid. The whole atmosphere 
seems changed. 

A man going up Mount Washington some- 
times finds at the top only a cloudy or stormy 
darkness, through which the sight does not pass 
at all. The whole peak welters in waves of fog. 
On another day — called by those who live there 
' bright ' — the air is full of a shimmering haze, 
in which the light-rays seem inter-twisted and 
tangled together, so that no eye can fairly pierce 
the glittering mist. It sees only summits of the 
neighboring mountains, surging around the cen- 
tral crest. But at last there comes a resplendent 
day, when through the clear transpicuous air you 
look afar. Your vision has found its perfect 
medium. You see the green meadows of Con- 
way lying almost at your feet, with the Saco 



g6 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

winding through ; and sixty miles away, as the 
bird flies, you look into the harbor of Portland, 
and perhaps see beyond it the flash of sails out 
on the sea. 

There are states of the mind which corre- 
spond with these changes, and of which they are 
the physical parallel. There come to us some- 
times high, luminous moments, of vision and 
intuition, when we see at a glance what before 
had been hidden, and realms of thought are in- 
stantly opened ; when a moment will do for us, 
what previous hours had failed to accomplish. 
Then subjects instantaneously take form, dis- 
courses shape themselves in our thoughts, and 
both outline and detail are conceived at once 
with perfect vividness.* 

This story is told of an eminent living clergy- 
man : I will not vouch for it, in all its partic- 
ulars, but in its main features I have the 
assurance that it is authentic. He was walk- 
ing one evening to a church at New Haven, at 

* Note XII. 



SERMON SUDDENLY SUGGESTED. 97 

which he was to preach, with a young lady, at 
whose home perhaps he had been entertained. 
She said to him on the way : " Dr. C — , is it true, 
as I have heard, that you sometimes do not 
select your text till you have gone into the pul- 
pit ? " " Yes," he said, " it is sometimes true ; 
and I wish you would give me a text for this 
evening, for really I have not yet decided on 
what to preach." " I would if I could," she 
said ; " but I can't think of any text at this 
moment, unless it be : ' The Lord spake unto 
Moses and unto Aaron, saying." " Excellent!" 
said he. " It is precisely what I want : I shall 
preach upon that." And he did. It would puz- 
zle us, perhaps, to discern at a glance what he 
saw in it. But it was one of the grandest sub- 
jects that can be given to any preacher, that 
can be considered by any man. It was the vast 
subject of the Divine Revelation. It opened to 
him, all at a flash, like a bright broad landscape 
seen through a crevice. 

Man's need of such a Revelation from above, 



98 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

and his constant tendency to sink into deeper 
darkness without it ; the fair expectation, from 
God's wisdom and goodness, that He will 
give it ; the different modes in which it is 
shown by Scripture to have been given — by 
oral utterance, by written words, by ecstatic 
visions and dreams, by prophetic inspiration, by 
the coming of the Son of God Himself, who 
shows to the world the very mind of God, as 
well as utters His separate thoughts, at last by 
the advent of the Holy Ghost, teaching the 
evangelists and the apostles ; then by all these, 
combined in one Bible, a book for all ages, a 
book for the world, a book to be interpreted to 
the studious reader by the same Divine Spirit 
from which its inspiration came : — this was the 
substance of the sermon. Then followed the 
lessons : of the grace of God, in giving this to 
man, and preserving it in the world ; of the duty 
and privilege of attending to it ; of the wicked- 
ness of substituting anything for it — either 
Reason, or the Church ; of the glory of the state 



THE MIND A BATTERY. 99 

in which even this Revelation will be needed no 
more, since we shall see God face to face. 

The whole discourse — as represented to me — 
was compact, complete, powerful, from the out- 
set on ; because it w r as fashioned by a mind in 
this high, fervid, luminous state of which I have 
spoken. It was precisely adapted, also, to a 
semi-sceptical state of mind at that time pre- 
vailing in the college, of which he was aware ; 
and so it was every way timely and effective. 

Well, of course, this is an extraordinary in- 
stance ; as the mental state expressed in it was 
extraordinary. But I suspect that every man who 
is much accustomed to speaking without manu- 
script has met something like it in his experi- 
ence. The mind now and then comes into a 
state in which any suggestion, any occurrence, 
will evoke great fulness and force of thought. 
It is then like a battery fully charged. It does 
not take a 64 pounder to draw out the flash 
from such a battery. A knitting-needle will do 
it ; the smallest bit of broken wire. And nothing 



100 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

is easier than to preach in that mood. Any text 
that is touched will set in motion trains of 
thought, to be instantly elaborated, and ready 
for instant presentation. 

But this state of mind cannot be extempo- 
rized. The will can no more create it at pleas- 
ure than it can make us three inches taller. It 
will always be found, when it has come, to have 
had deep vital roots beneath it. How then can 
we gain it ? and keep the mind in this best con- 
dition for grandest service ? The means are 
many. I can mention only one or two. 

Reading, intently, and rapidly, is one of them. 
There is great virtue in rapid reading, when it 
is also attentive and studious. Ours is apt, I 
think, to be too lazy, indolent, self-indulgent. 
We read, and hardly know sometimes whether 
we are reading or dozing.* Reading rapidly, as 
well as attentively, gives pace to the mind, a 
general celerity to the whole mental movement. 
It trains the intellectual force to just that sure 

* Note XIII. 



READING WIDELY. 10 1 

and vigorous quick-step which one always wants 
in speaking to men, with an earnest conviction, 
but without any notes. There is great benefit, 
therefore, in such reading ; and the impulse and 
stimulus which one carries away from it are of 
more importance than many minor particulars 
of knowledge. 

Read widely, too ; history, science, philosophy, 
poetry, works on law, works on art, as well as 
discussions in metaphysics. Do not read too 
exclusively in theology. The man who confines 
himself wholly to that develops only a part of 
his mind ; keeps only a certain set of faculties 
in exercise and training. He is apt to get an 
eye like a microscopic lens, fine in its distinc- 
tions, not wide in its range. What the minister 
needs, who would speak to men effectively, is the 
widest development. He should keep his mind, 
therefore, in quickening contact with other 
minds in many and various departments of 
thought. Only eschew fiction ; or use it, if at all, 
in great moderation. As a general thing, it 



102 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

doesn't help. It rather relaxes and ungirds the 
mind ; acts as a laxative, or an anaesthetic, rather 
than as a real invigorant. 

I do not know that I should go so far as to 
insist on your following precisely the example 
of an excellent friend of mine, who once 
read David Copperfield, when he had a tough 
toothache, and who afterward said to the gen- 
tleman who had furnished it that he did not 
know whether he had done right or not, but cer- 
tainly he had not read any other work of fiction 
for twenty years ; not since he read Bunyan's 
Holy War ! But I should say, read it very 
little ; in vacation, if at all, or in time of recrea- 
tion, and not when you are actively at work. 
And when you read, read only the masters, — 
Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer, Scott, and the like ; 
and let the great herd of writers of stories go 
their way. They bring no profit. Keep the 
mind braced — that is the rule — by contact 
with large and disciplinary subjects, as treated by 
vigorous and liberal minds ; and accustom your- 



STIMULUS OF CONVERSATION. IO3 

selves to a swift and thorough redaction of sub- 
jects as you read. But do not read to the point 
of weariness. Absorb and assimilate as much 
as you can, but never undertake to carry the 
burden of multitudes of things to be afterward 
remembered. The force is what you want, 
rather than the load.* 

Conversation, too, with equal minds, is of im- 
mense and constant service in refreshing the 
mind, and replenishing it with active force. 
Indeed, conversation, if practised as it ought to 
be, as a commerce of thought between respon- 
sive and interchanging minds, is an invaluable 
aid toward gaining the art of easy and self-pos- 
sessed public speech. I do not think we have 
as much of it as we ought ; or that it holds the 
place which it should in our plans of life, as a real 
educational force. It is much the same exercise, 
if you analyze it, with public -speaking. Of course 
it is not the same altogether. In public speech 
your utterance of thought is more prolonged : it 

* Note XIV. 



104 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

is monologue, not dialogue. You miss the help 
which comes from interjected remarks or re- 
plies ; and you are not so immediately conscious 
of the sympathy or the collision of the adjacent 
minds. Still, conversation is much the same 
form of mental activity ; and it always helps the 
public speaker. It trains the mind to think rap- 
idly, and to formulate thought with facility and 
success ; and each sense of such success, which 
is gained in conversation, will give one more 
confidence when he stands before an audience. 

Instead of talking to ten persons, you are there 
to talk to five hundred ; but the one exercise has 
helped for the other, as singing in a parlor helps 
to sing in a choir, or as shooting with an air-gun, 
at ten paces, helps one to shoot straight with a 
rifle, at a hundred. One who is silent, secluded, 
all the week, without contact with men, had 
better always read his sermons. He will be cer- 
tainly timorous, and self-conscious, when Sunday 
comes ; afraid of other minds, except as they 
speak to him through books. But one who has 



VARIETY OF WORK. 105 

the opportunity, and uses it, of energetic and 
frank conversation, on important subjects, with 
equal minds, will be reinforced by it, and will be 
sure to come to his pulpit more ripe and ready 
for his work, more confident of his power to 
utter thought without having written it. 

Variety of work, too, assists this result. I 
mean, of course, variety of work within reason- 
able limits. I shouldn't advise you, when you 
come to be ministers, to undertake any wholly 
superfluous work like this of mine — giving lec- 
tures to young gentlemen who already have pro- 
fessors to tell them more than their heads can 
hold ! But aside from such absurd excess, 
within reasonable limits, the more various a 
man's work is, the more likely he is to keep his 
mind in an animated, active, and forceful state. 
When some one spoke, you know, to Dr. Lyman 
Beecher of a man who ' had too many irons in 
the fire,' his reply was, ' Nonsense ! let him put 
them all in : poker, tongs, shovel, and all. It 
never will hurt him.' The fact that he himself 



106 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

was always so ready for any work, which prom- 
ised important Christian success, was in part the 
secret of that commanding and quickening 
power which he possessed so largely and so 
long. Variety of occupation sets the spirit in a 
glow. It relieves one faculty by exercising an- 
other. It keeps all forces alert and ready, and 
tends to make one ambi-dextrous.* 

With this variety of work, this habit of con- 
versation, this rapid and wide reading, one may 
at any rate keep his mind at as high a state of 
freshness and energy as is to him possible. 
And in that state it is easy to speak one's 
thought to others. Then the stimulus of the 
audience only further assists him. When he 
comes to his congregation, and sees the eager 
listening faces upturned toward his, perhaps sees 
the flush or the tear as he speaks, there is im- 
mense incentive in it. He may then reach 
points of vision and power impossible to be 
attained in the study. He may even reproduce, 

* Note XV. 



RESULT OF SUCH TRAINING. IO7 

in a measure, the experience of the eloquent 
preacher in this city, not of our faith, who is 
said to have said that when he had reached a cer- 
tain occasional pitch of intensity, in conviction 
and feeling, he had nothing more to do with the 
sermon than just to open and shut his jaws. 
' There is a little fellow up there in the brain 
who does the rest ; and where it all comes from 
I hardly know.' 

Then the mind walks on its high places. It 
works automatically, and with sovereign force, 
without constraint or urgency of volition. The 
man himself is amazed at the rush with which 
both thought and utterance come. The reserved 
forces all break into play. Things are at hand, 
which had seemed inaccessible. Previous knowl- 
edge is as if transfigured. The whole spirit is 
full of energy, full of light. It rejoices to re- 
veal itself, in action and in speech ; and its 
words are instinct with brightness and power. 

Such moods will only come of themselves. 
They cannot be summoned by an effort of will, 



108 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

any more than you can make a cold day warmer 
by heating the thermometer. But they come 
only to minds prepared for them, by such a dis- 
cipline as I have suggested. And when they 
come, you have the sense, as at no other time, of 
doing your kingly errand in the world for One 
who is Himself speaking through you — through 
the mind which, in all its intensified powers, is 
subordinate to His ! When a congregation has 
once felt the luxury and the exhilaration of such 
an experience they will never be content until 
it has been repeated.* 

Then, Thirdly : Be careful that the plan of 
your sermon is simple, natural \ progressive, easily 
mastered, and is thoroughly imbedded in your 
mind. — This seems to me indispensable. 

If there is any secret in regard to speaking 
freely without notes, which I have learned, it is 
simply this : that the recollective forces of the 
mind, which are in their nature subordinate and 
auxiliary, are to be kept strictly in abeyance — 
* Note XVI. 



PLAN OF THE SERMON. IO9 

not to be called on for any service — so that the 
spontaneous, suggestive, creative powers may 
have continual and unhindered play. Nothing, 
if possible, should be left to be recalled at the 
time of speaking, by a distinct act of memory. 
The more you try to recollect, the less effective 
your sermon will be. The more frequently you 
have to look backward, in the course of it, the 
less aggressive productive energy will remain in 
your mind ; and it is this, if any thing, which is 
to win and to move the assembly. 

It is indispensable, therefore, that the main 
plan of the sermon be from the start so plainly 
in view that it comes up of itself, as it is needed, 
and does not require to be pulled into sight with 
any effort. To this end, it must be simple, 
obvious, natural, so that it fixes itself in the 
mind ; and must - be clearly articulated in its 
parts. If possible, let it be so arranged that one 
point naturally leads to another, and, when the 
treatment of it is finished, leaves you in front of 
that which comes next. Then take up that, and 



110 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

treat it in its order, until, through that treatment, 
you reach the third, and find it inevitable to 
proceed to consider that. By such a progressive 
arrangement of thought you are yourself carried 
forward ; your faculties have continual liberty ; 
you are not forced to pause in the work of 
addressing yourself directly to the people. 

Of course you may secure this in either one 
of a variety of ways. 

You may get it, for example, by a strictly 
textual division of the subject, when the structure 
of your text admits of that. Take Paul's decla- 
ration, for example, in his epistle to the Romans: 
[viii. 28.] "And we know that all things work 
together for good to them that love God, to them 
who are the called according to his purpose." 
" We know : " what right had Paul to speak 
thus, with such supreme certainty ? Because 
he had been assured of it by God, and had found 
it verified in his experience. We may rest on his 
knowledge, and make it ours. " All things : " 
all facts, and forces, and laws of the universe, 



TEXTUAL DIVISION. Ill 



from the smallest animalcule to the star Alcy- 
one : what a measureless compass in this declara- 
tion ! " Work : " nothing is inactive, all things, 
and all beings, under God's ordination, are in 
motion for effects. ." Work together : " in har- 
mony with each other, as all proceeding from 
one Divine mind, and moving in the develop- 
ment of one supreme plan. " Work together for 
good : " the beneficence of all in the final result ; 
such as must be anticipated, since He from 
whom they start is good, and He cannot do 
otherwise than manifest His character in the 
ends toward which the universe tends. But it 
is for good " to them that love Him : " to those 
who are in union, by moral sympathy, with the 
Head of the creation, having been lifted and 
inspired to that sympathy by His inviting and 
quickening grace. 

The text itself suggests the succession of the 
divisions, if you choose so to treat it ; and each 
following word is the fulcrum of an argument. 

And then the practical lessons come, just as 



112 . PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

naturally : of comfort to those who are in trouble ; 
of courage and enterprise to those who are trying 
to work for God ; of assurance of hope, to those 
who are consciously allied to Him, through 
joyful and affectionate faith in His Son. — There 
is nothing here to be laboriously recalled. It 
presents itself, as fast as you want it ; and you 
could not forget it, if you tried. 

Or, you may reach the same result by a topical 
division of the subject, if you prefer that. Take, 
for example, another declaration of the same 
great Apostle, in his letter to the Colossians : 
[i. 14.] " In whom we have redemption through 
his blood, even the forgiveness of sins." — There 
is a consciousness of sin in every man ; of 
omission, at least, if not of wrong-doing ; of 
defect in virtue, if not of a fierce and virulent 
depravity. With this comes the conscious need 
of forgiveness, which is the inevitable correlative 
of the other, and will be apparent to all who are 
thoughtful. Is there any answer then, on the 
part of God, to this need of ours ? Several 



TOPICAL DIVISION. 113 

answers are current in the world, and challenge 
attention. 

It is said, for example, that He never forgives ; 
He cannot, in the nature of the case. Moral 
forces work as irresistibly, moral laws are as 
inexorable, as those which rule in the physical 
world. The man who breaks law must take the 
consequences. The morally poisoned cannot be 
helped. — This is the positivist, the deistical 
idea. It is a terrible response to our keen and 
tremulous sense of need. 

Another is, that He forgives capriciously : 
those who have been born of good parents ; those 
who have lived in Christian society ; who have 
had a fortunate mental constitution ; who have 
been influential ; who have not done any thing 
flagrantly bad ; — such are forgiven, though no 
change of character is manifest in them. This 
is an answer,, if possible, still more terrible than 
the other ; since the man unforgiven is discrimi- 
nated against, in favor of one who had a better 
opportunity. That cannot be admitted. 



114 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

A third answer is, that He forgives univer- 
sally, without reference to circumstances, with- 
out distinction of character, because He is 
kind : and this is the worst conception of all. — 
For by it all moral law is annulled, and chaos 
comes in the spiritual universe ; God himself 
losing the bright attestation of His holiness ; 
Mary Magdalen sitting in heaven beside Hero- 
dias ; the two thieves entering its gates together, 
and Judas appearing there long before John. It 
is incredible that this should be the answer. 

The remaining one is the answer of the Gos- 
pel, summed up in the text : that God forgives ; 
forgives not capriciously, but with wise, definite, 
and Divine pre-arrangement ; forgives univer- 
sally, on the ground of an atonement, and on 
the condition of repentance and faith. — This 
answer shows God's kindness, holiness, wisdom, 
together, and fully illustrates what is glorious in 
Him. It fits precisely to man's sense of need. 
It makes forgiveness attainable to each, while 
upholding perfectly the supreme moral order. 



PROGRESSIVE ARRANGEMENT. II5 



And from it we learn the preciousness of the 
Bible, and gain an argument for its Divine 
origin ; the privilege of accepting God's offer 
of forgiveness; the infinite hazard, the self- 
inflicted damage, of neglecting or refusing it. 

You will observe, Gentlemen, that I am not 
proposing this, or either of these, as in any 
sense a model-plan- for one of your sermons. 
You have an eminent professor to do that, and 
I could not attempt the office, if I were asked. 
I only sketch rapidly these possible plans- to 
illustrate, by examples, what I have said : that it 
is perfectly possible, and very desirable, so to 
arrange the subject before you that each point 
when treated shall lead you to the next, and land 
you in front of it ; so that the forward move- 
ment of the mind, from first to last, may be 
wholly unhindered. You require a thorough 
organization of the subject in your own mind, 
if you are to present it without a manuscript, 
with any degree of freedom and vigor. There 
must be method and progress in your arrange- 



Il6 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

merit, or the mind will infallibly be all the while 
occupied in getting hold of its instruments, not 
in using them on the people. 

It has been said, very admirably, of one 
brilliant and epigrammatic writer of our day, 
that " his sentences are like sabre-cuts : they 
have succession, but not connection." Such a 
writer, I should think, must read what he writes, 
or repeat it from memory. There must be con- 
nection, as well as succession, in the thoughts 
which one would express without notes ; and 
the more fully and deeply the plan of the dis- 
course is imbedded in the mind, and made self- 
suggestive, the more elastic and buoyant is the 
tread of the mind in all the discussion. 

If needful to this result, I would write the plan 
of the sermon over twenty times, before preach- 
ing it ; not copying, merely, from one piece of 
paper upon another, but writing it out, carefully 
and fully, each time independently, till I per- 
fectly knew it ; till it was fixed, absolutely, in 
the mind. A German, called as a candidate for 



THE PLAN FULLY IN MIND. WJ 

the jury-box in one of the courts the other day, 
was asked if he could change, on further evi- 
dence, an opinion which he affirmed that he had 
formed. " No," said he, " I cannot change it, for 
it is all mixed tip mit my mind ! " The plan of 
a discourse, if one is to present it without help 
from a manuscript, should be so absolutely 
mixed up with his mind that he cannot forget 
it ; that it stays there of itself, and comes up 
without effort as it is wanted. One may often 
profitably spend more time, therefore, on the 
principal arrangement of the subject, and its 
proper distribution, than on all the collateral 
and auxiliary details ; as they say that more life, 
if not more labor, was spent on the piles beneath 
the St. Petersburg church of St. Isaac's, to 
get a foundation, than on all the magnificent 
r.iarbles and malachite which have since been 
lodged in it. It must be a primary, principal 
aim, in preparing each discourse, to have the 
ground-work sound and sure, and absolutely 
established in your mind. 



Il8 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

It need not be made apparent, perhaps, to the 
congregation. It is not always best, I think, to 
have the frame of a sermon like the frame of a 
Swiss cottage, all shown on the outside. It may 
be better to keep it within, and to have the 
presence and the strength of it manifested only 
in the dignity and stability of the structure 
which it braces and governs. But it must be 
there, and give symmetry and security to all the 
details which grow up upon it.* Saadi, the Per- 
sian poet, is quoted by some writer whom I have 
forgotten, as comparing Fortune to a peacock, 
" with a show}' tail, but a frightful pair of legs." 
I have sometimes heard sermons which recalled 
the description. The general arrangement of 
thoughts in your sermon will constitute the 
legs, on which it is to move. Be very sure that 
they are strong, sustaining, progressive ; and 
then let the tail be as God pleases. 

When once you have the main plan of the 
sermon fully in mind, be not too solicitous about 

* Note XVII. 



SERMON ALWAYS FRESH. II9 

minor things, and especially be careful not to 
let the thoughts become engaged to too many 
details, which you wish to recall. If you do, you 
will be as one walking with a thousand minute 
weights attached to him, each one of them small, 
but their aggregate amount an overpowering 
hinderance. It is as good a rule in preaching a 
sermon as it is in living the Christian life : 
" lay aside every weight ; " every thing, that is, 
which catches you as with a hook ; and the 
habit of remembering, which so easily winds 
itself about you ; and, being sure of your general 
governing scheme of thought, let the details, of 
illustration and expression, be largely those 
which suggest themselves, either in consequence 
of previous thought, or without that. 

Then if you preach the sermon a second time 
the hearers will find in it the same general plan, 
but a different physiognomy. The filling out of 
the plan will be so different — in forms of state- 
ment, subordinate thoughts, illustrative images 
or examples — that the effect of it will be wholly 



120 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

new. The sermon re-preached will be substan- 
tially as fresh as at first. A clergyman lately 
deceased, in New England, is reported to have 
said that ' an old sermon, with a new text, and a 
new application, is as good as a new one, because 
of its new collar and cuffs.' But if you follow 
my different plan, and have the same text, if 
you like, and the same outline, but with such 
different subordinate thoughts, whenever you 
preach, as arc then suggested — accepting them 
as they come, integrating them with the dis- 
course as you proceed — the sermon will be 
always practically a new one ; as related to your 
mind, as related to your hearers. It will have 
the same bones, but with a different covering, a 
different coloring, and in fact a wholly fresh and 
individual life. 

Still further, and Fourthly : After this care 
of your health of body, and your energy of mind, 
and this careful mastery of the general plan to be 
followed in the sermon, it is necessary also that 
you have command of sufficient subordinate 



KEEP THE MIND FREE. 121 

trains of thought to aid you in unfolding and 
impressing the subject. — Have images in mind, 
illustrative instances, whatever may be needed 
to set forth, exalt, enforce your theme. But 
never suffer yourselves to be commanded by 
them. Be always careful to keep yourselves free 
from any such subjection to them that you will 
feel bound to recall and reproduce them. 

The distinction here is the very obvious and 
familiar distinction between voluntary recollec- 
tion, which always implies effort, and involuntary 
recollection, where things come up to us ' of 
themselves,' as we say. It is the latter by which 
we should aid ourselves in preaching, not the 
former. There are many things which we recall 
only by a positive exertion ; names, dates, the 
location of unfamiliar towns on the map, the 
technics of any art, the scientific nomenclature ; 
in general, any thing unconnected and new. Un- 
less my memory deceives me, one of your pro- 
fessors was beginning the study of Hebrew with 
me in the seminary, when the professor having 



122 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

charge of the class wrote some disconnected 
characters from the Hebrew alphabet on the 
black-board, — Aleph, Daleth, Samech, Tsade, 
and so on, — taking them at hazard, as they 
occurred to him ; and our friend was suddenly 
asked to pronounce them. After looking a mo- 
ment he was compelled to confess that, though he 
knew the old Hebrew gentlemen by sight, to save 
his life he could not yet call them by name. He 
got so afterward that he could call them by name, 
with instant accuracy ; and it is wholly unneces- 
sary to praise the progress in that acquaintance 
which he has since made, or the use he has made 
of it. But at that early time, to recall them, on 
the instant, was quite beyond him. 

There are other things, however, which one 
recalls without the slightest conscious effort ; 
which picture themselves upon his mind, with a 
vividness ineffaceable, and which reappear when 
he least is expecting them. The Sistine Ma- 
donna, the Transfiguration, some charming Swiss 
or Italian landscape with lake and mountains, a 



INVOLUNTARY RECOLLECTION. 1 23 

sunset at sea, the face of a friend — these do not 
need to be summoned back. They present them- 
selves without our call ; and sometimes rise up 
most distinctly when the thoughts had seemed 
entirely preoccupied with other things. When 
the mind is in a fervent and stimulated state, such 
things occur to it, and a multitude of others, most 
rapidly and surely. They come in throngs, one 
suggesting another, all pushing on swiftly for 
recognition, and if need be for use. 

Now it is this involuntary, spontaneous, self- 
suggesting recollection, by which one who speaks 
without notes must be aided ; and the process 
of training it to render such assistance is very 
simple. 

In the case of a sermon, for example : as you 
first think the subject carefully through, subor- 
dinate trains of thought will occur, illustrating 
the main one ; passages in literature will be sug- 
gested, perhaps ; historical examples ; Scriptural 
analogies ; scenes in nature, or startling passages 
in personal experience ; all bearing upon the sub- 



124 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

ject, and which rise to your mind in instant and 
fit connection with it.* It is well, I think, to make 
a brief memorandum of such, indicating- them at 
least by a line or a catch-word on the brief. 
When you go through the subject again, say on 
Saturday evening, some of these will again occur, 
and others will not ; but in place of those which 
do not come back, if your mind is in an active 
and a fruitful condition, others will suggest 
themselves. Now look at your notes, and add 
references to these, noticing again what you pre- 
viously had thought of, but have now overlooked. 
Thus you have at a glance before you all that 
has been suggested to your mind, in connection 
with the subject. It will be almost certainly 
more than enough to fill your sermon ; and when 
you finally recall it, in the morning, whatever is 
best in it will be likely to come back. 

Then go and preach ; and, in the pulpit, that 
which had previously approved itself to your 
mind as fit, striking, germane to the subject, 
* Note XVIII. 



NEVER STOP TO RECALL. 1 25 

will again almost certainly be suggested, com- 
ing up after its own law, and often in the very 
words in which it first was presented to the 
mind. Then give it as it comes. Never stop to 
recall any thing which you are vaguely and 
doubtfully conscious of having purposed to say, 
but which has somehow slipped from your 
thought. The pause is perilous ; and you prob- 
ably will not get back what you miss. You have 
seen a boy, perhaps, pushing his arm between 
the pickets of a fence to get the round and roll- 
ing foot-ball which has fallen beyond it. He can 
just touch the ball with his fingers, but cannot 
grasp it ; and the moment he presses it, off it 
rolls. So it is, often, with the thought which 
a speaker tries to recover, when he has passed 
it. It slips away again the instant you reach 
for it, and will not come back ; while, in the effort 
to regain it, you have lost your hold upon the 
congregation. 

Men are not responsive to an introverted 
mind. You never notice, yourselves, what an 



126 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

absent-minded man is saying to you ; it is sound, 
without thought in it. And if your mind is not 
with the people, but hunting for something back 
of yourself, you might much better be saying 
nothing. There is nothing an audience more 
enjoys than being directly and forcibly addressed, 
by a full mind, which has studied its subject, and 
now is pouring out its thought without hesita- 
tion, without reserve. But they recoil, and slip 
from the grasp, the moment they see that your 
principal effort is to recall things, not to impress 
things already in mind. They love to be com- 
manded ; but they hate the cowardice which 
springs from a memory imperfect and uneasy. 

So avoid this peril. Have plenty of thoughts 
beforehand in your mind, but let them come to 
your lips as they will ; and if they don't come, 
never go back for them. They will come again, 
at some other time ; and meantime others, which 
very likely are better, will come in their place, 
if you go forward. Lord Brougham said of 
Burke that his finest images are not those which 



DR. KIRKS ILLUSTRATION. 12J 

he had meditated beforehand, but those which 
were struck from his intense mind in the heat of 
debate : ' like sparks from a working engine, and 
not like fire-works for mere display.' One can 
never repeat such passages afterward, with the 
vividness and force which belonged to them at 
first. The inspiration of the occasion, which 
shot its force through them, cannot be replaced. 
Dr. Kirk, in the earlier years of that part of 
his ministry which followed his return from 
Europe, was wont to preach without full notes, 
though I think he always used some in the pul- 
pit. Once, when he was preaching at Pittsfield, 
a gentleman who was sitting in the gallery has 
told me that he described, toward the end of his 
sermon, the way of worldly pleasure and gain, 
without thought of God, as a smooth broad road, 
along whose easy and gradual slopes men care- 
lessly walked, till they came on a sudden to the 
precipice at the end ; and so vivid was the final 
image, as it flashed from his mind upon the 
assembly, that when he depicted them going over 



128 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

the edge, a rough-looking man, who sat next to 
my friend, rose in his place, and looked over the 
gallery-front, to see the chasm into which they 
were falling! The whole figure had doubtless 
come with a rush to the mind of the preacher. 
It was as vivid to Dr. Kirk, on the instant of its 
utterance, as it was to this hearer. The whole 
swing of the sermon was behind it, as it leaped 
into speech ; and it could not have been repeated, 
with any thing of the same effect. An effort to 
reproduce it, afterward, would have been like cut- 
ting the flower from stalk and root, to brighten 
other days with its beauty. What at first was 
spontaneous, would have then been a matter of 
mere art and mechanics. 

So never go back to remember things, which do 
not spontaneously come up to your mind while 
you are speaking. Make as full preparation as 
you can, but leave it if it lingers. Let the push 
of your soul be in all that you say, and every 
sentence be charged with the vitality of an ad- 
vancing and out-giving mind. 



THE MIND READY FOR WORK. 120, 

Next week I shall speak of some of the moral 
and spiritual conditions of success in preaching 
without one's notes. What I have to say to-day 
closes here. If you have within you the inspir- 
ing conviction that the Gospel has come from the 
mind of God, and is indispensable to the welfare 
of man ; if you are then careful to keep your whole 
physical vigor at the highest attainable point, and 
to keep your mind in a state of correspond- 
ing activity and energy ; if you make the plan 
of your sermon simple and natural, and imbed it 
in your thoughts, so that the mind in treating the 
subject naturally runs along on that plan, without 
effort or care, and is all the while free, ready for 
whatever suggestions may come ; if you have 
sufficient command of subordinate trains of 
thought, of illustrations, images, historical in- 
stances, germane to the subject, but are not 
yourself commanded by them, and are ready to 
take them or to leave them according as at the 
moment they recur, or fail to appear; — then you 
have, I think, the essential physical and mental 



130 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

conditions of that success which is possible for 
you. You may speak then with freedom, force, 
pleasure, and with direct and useful effect on the 
minds you address ; with more effect, I suspect, 
oftentimes, than if you read a careful essay. 

So fulfil these conditions, Gentlemen : and then 
follow the advice which Jehoshaphat gave, when 
he set of the priests and the chief of the fa- 
thers to be judges in Israel, and gave them their 
motto, — among the grandest, I think, in all his- 
tory ; certainly there is none like it in the 
Kaiser-saal at Frankfurt, under all the portraits 
of German emperors which there are assembled, 
— " Deal courageously ; and the Lord shall be 
with the good ! " 



THIRD LECTURE. 



Mr. President : Young Gentlemen : — 

In each of these talks to you I illustrate in 
myself, as I am quite aware, one of the disad- 
vantages connected with the practice of speak- 
ing without notes ; a disadvantage which 
becomes especially noticeable, and especially 
important, when one has a large subject to pre- 
sent, the treatment of which must be com- 
pressed into a comparatively small space of 
time. 

I have been conscious every time, after 
speaking to you, that there were many things 
which I had not touched, of which I should 
have been glad to speak if the hour had 
permitted, and if I had not spoken under the 

*3* 



132 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

pressure of its sharp limitations. I feel the 
same thing more keenly to-day, because each of 
the points which I have to present is deserving 
of special and separate treatment, and might 
reasonably occupy a full hour by itself : while I 
have to present them all within the same limits, 
or as near that as I can. It seems like trying 
to squeeze the thousand volumes of a library 
into one book-case : or to pack the entire furni- 
ture of a room in a couple of trunks. 

I shall be constrained to treat the subjects rap- 
idly, cursorily, in a way which I fear will seem to 
your minds, as well as to my own, unsatisfactory. 
But I have no alternative, having no other after- 
noons on which I could properly ask you to hear 
me, or, indeed, on which I could promise to 
meet you here. I must therefore do briefly, in 
a summary way, what it would be pleasanter to 
do more at leisure, with larger scope ; since 
whatever I am to say must be finished to-day. 

In the last talk I spoke, as you will remember, 
of certain physical and mental conditions of 



CONDITIONS OF SUCCESS. 1 33 

success in preaching without one's manuscript. 
These are, all of them, important in themselves. 
But they become still more important as con- 
nected with others, moral and spiritual, which 
are to them ulterior and supreme. First comes 
always, in God's arrangement, that which is 
natural ; and, afterward, that which is spiritual. 
The conditions which I have to-day to present 
stand in this Divine order ; and they come last 
because they are highest. They are not, indeed, 
important only to one who speaks without his 
notes. They are important also, perhaps as 
much so, to one who carefully writes his sermons. 
But they are indispensable to the first ; and it is 
his need, his proper self-discipline and equip- 
ment of mind, which I am trying to set before 
you. I should leave the whole subject, there- 
fore, most inadequately treated, if I did not pro- 
ceed to speak of these, as I intend to do to- 
day, t 

The First of them which I specify is this : 
One should have a distinct and an energetic 



134 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

sense of the importance of that particular subject 
on which lie is to preacli at the time. 

I said, at the beginning of the lecture last 
week, that the minister should have, as a neces- 
sary pre-requisite to any real success whatever, 
a serious, paramount, inspiring sense of the 
Divine origin and authority of the Gospel, and of 
its transcendent importance to men. This is 
indispensable to success in preaching, either with 
notes or without them. Unless one has it, it 
is hard to see why he should enter the ministry 
it all ; and if he does, he will be almost certain 
to fail, — not understanding his own errand in 
the world, and not having his forces fully drawn 
forth by the truth which he presents. 

I do not now repeat, you observe, what I then 
said ; but I add to it this essential particular, 
that he should have also a distinct, animating, 
inspiring impression of the importance of that 
individual subject upon»which he is at the time 
to preach — of the theme which he has immedi- 
ately in hand. 



IMPORTANCE OF SUBJECTS. 1 35 

It has such importance, if it is really a part of 
the Gospel ; and if it is not, he ought not to 
bring it to the pulpit at all. As compared with 
other truths embraced in the great complex har- 
mony of Revelation, it may not have a superior, 
possibly not even an equal, importance. There 
are orders and hierarchies in the Divine realms, 
both of being and of truth. Not every doctrine 
is so fundamental as is that of human depravity. 
Not every fact is so central in the Gospel as is 
that of the Passion and the Cross. Not every 
truth is so dominant and supreme as is that of 
the Judgment to come. It is not every particular 
in the life of the Lord which has such import- 
ance in itself, or such a power to quicken us, as 
has the Resurrection. It is not every one of 
the Psalms which is so attractive or so impressive 
to the Christian heart as is the twenty-third or 
the fifty-first. 

At the same time it is true that, # as compared 
with the subjects which ordinarily engage the 
attention of men, any theme suggested by the 



I36 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

Gospel to the mind of the preacher — which is 
itself a part of that Gospel — has an intrinsic, a 
continuing, a surpassing importance. It is a 
part of the whole structure, as is every part of 
the stately column, — base, shaft, capital, and the 
very volutes upon it. It is important to all the 
rest, as is every member of the human frame, 
— the eye, the ear, the finger, and the foot, 
as well as the nobler heart and brain. It is a 
part of the Divine word ; one of God's thoughts, 
which He has spoken to the world, through men 
inspired of the Holy Ghost. And if it was worth 
while for Him to speak it, certainly it is worth 
while for us each one to meditate upon it, and 
proclaim it to others. 

It has, too, its own great office to accomplish. 
It is one of the instruments which God means 
to use for quickening and renewing the souls of 
men; which is in fact used, by the Spirit of God, 
for that august end. Whether, therefore, it seem 
to us more or less important in itself, if employed 
for that sublime result it has immense and im- 



THE HUMBLEST TRUTH USEFUL. 1 37 

mortal value ; and you can never say before- 
hand whether this or that particular truth shall 
be the means which God will use. Sometimes 
He takes the humblest truth, as it looks to us, 
and makes it most efficient to accomplish His 
end. The rod of Moses had no power in itself 
to roll back the waves, or to make them again 
return in strength ; but God gave it such power. 
The mantle of Elijah had 'no charm in itself to 
divide the waters of Jordan when it smote them; 
but God gave it its efficiency. And sometimes, 
as if to magnify his grace, and set forth most 
fully the glory and the choice of His sovereign 
will, He makes what seems to man unimportant 
the instrument of His greatest work. A narra- 
tive may do more than a large and careful devel- 
opment of doctrine. A portrait of character, or 
of any trait in it, may bless men more than pre- 
cept, or argument, or an elaborate exposition of 
prophecy. What seems the least becomes often 
the mightiest, when the push of God's Spirit is 
behind it. 



I38 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

Always, therefore, remember that the special 
truth which you are to treat has importance in 
itself, and may be the instrument in the Hand 
above for accomplishing the work toward which 
your entire labor is tending ; and then engage 
your mind to it for the time, as if no other sub- 
ject existed. Keep it in distinct and quickening 
contemplation. Be the 'man of one idea,' till 
your sermon is ended ; and let that idea be the 
one before you. 

It is not difficult to do this. All that you 
need is to hold the subject before your thoughts 
until its relation to God's mind, on the one hand, 
and to His revelation, and on the other to the 
minds of your hearers, is evident to you, and you 
have felt the impression of it. It is one of the 
best tests of a subject, of its intrinsic solidity and 
value, if it will bear such intent and continuing 
meditation. If it will, it will bear discussion in 
the pulpit. You may throw your whole weight 
on it, without diffidence or reserve. But if it 
shrinks, as you consider it, gives way, shows 



TEST OF A SUBJECT. 1 39 

weakness, depend upon it it is some theory of your 
own, which has not the validity that belongs to 
God's truth. Take the iron-pyrites. It sparkles 
like gold, and you think for the moment that it 
is gold, perhaps. But when you lift it in your 
hand, it is light. When you touch it with the 
fire of chemical analysis, you detect the fumes 
of sulphur in it ; while the gold, with no more 
gleam on its surface, is solid and pure. In like 
manner, take a subject, look at it en all sides, 
hold it before your attentive scrutiny, till you 
have ascertained all that is in it ; and then, if it 
still satisfies your mind, and quickens your heart, 
it is a subject to preach upon. 

Nor is it at all dangerous to do this. It is 
sometimes objected that a preacher will become 
one-sided and narrow, will preach only on a 
given set of subjects, if he follows this method, 
of absorbing himself for the time altogether in 
the theme which is before him. But there is not 
half so much danger of this in preaching without 
a manuscript as with one. I have known one 



140 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 



man who preached so long on the doctrine of 
Sin that there seemed no room remaining in his 
mind for the promise of Salvation ; and another 
who preached upon Fore-ordination, till one was 
really tempted to apply to him the rough remark 
of Robert Hall about a minister who did the 
same thing in the neighborhood of Bristol — 
that ' he must have been fore-ordained, from all 
eternity, to be a fool.' And I have known one 
who preached upon Baptism, himself a paedo-bap- 
tist, till the people were not only showered but 
soaked with it. Each one of these men wrote 
his sermons ! 

You will remember, perhaps, what I said in 
my first talk, a fortnight ago, about the necessity 
of discharging the mind of each subject, suc- 
cessively, when it has been treated ; of putting 
it thoroughly out of your thoughts, and taking 
another in its place. This is difficult, certainly ; 
especially at first. But it can be accomplished ; 
and one can form the habit of doing it, till it 
shall be easy, and a matter of course. Do this, 



THE SUBJECT TO BE SPECIFIC. I4I 

then, regularly. When you have preached on one 
subject divest your mind of it, and take another. 
In that way treat each subject, as it occurs, 
amply, cordially, eagerly, with enthusiasm, with 
the whole force of your mind and your will 
centred upon it for the time ; and as, by degrees, 
you go the round of that great system which lies 
before you in the Scripture, ultimately you will 
have treated, with fulness and force, the whole 
circle of Christian truth, precept, and promise. 

If your subject, for example, is the nature of 
faith, keep it specific. Do not allow it to be- 
come mixed in your thought with any thing 
else. Conceive in your own mind, and show to 
others, precisely what it is — this penitent and 
loving confidence in God, who is declared to us 
in Christ ; which has in it the element of power 
and holiness, and which is the condition of life 
eternal. Have it as clear before yourselves, make 
it as clear before your hearers, as was the out- 
line of Grace Church tower and spire to me a 
few minutes since, as I walked up Broadway. 



142 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

Or, if your subject is the power of faith, treat 
that as distinctly ; until the essential heroism of 
spirit of which it is the parent comes vividly 
before you and your people ; till they see that 
faith is everywhere the real heroic and conquer- 
ing force — that which drives the explorer 
through thick-ribbed ice of Arctic seas ; that 
which sends the traveller through tangled forests, 
malarious swamps, and stony deserts of Central 
Africa ; that which pushed Columbus across the 
sea to find this continent, in spite of the con- 
stant fears of his sailors that if he went further 
his ship would slide over the rim of the planet. 

Faith is the true power of heroism, over the 
world ; not in religion only, but in all common 
and secular affairs. It gives the power that 
moves mankind. Dwell upon that, then, in your 
thoughts, and make it plain and palpable to 
others, till they with you cannot help but see the 
connection there is, and the reason of the connec- 
tion, between evangelical faith on earth and the 
vision on high — the hope to which it here 



EACH SUBJECT IN TURN. I43 

inspires, the heaven which there it swiftly 
opens. 

So if your subject be one of those specific 
graces which Peter commands to be added to 
faith — courage, knowledge, self-restraint, patient 
endurance — either of those which he would 
have led up by the Christian, hand in hand, as 
in the Greek chorus : consider it with discrimi- 
nating attention ; treat it distinctively ; show its 
relation to the entrance which shall by-and-by be 
richly ministered, as by a chorus of saints and 
angels, into the kingdom of God's glory. If it 
be a doctrine, of human depravity : feel it your- 
selves, and make others feel it ; the depth, the 
energy, the consequences of it. So, equally, if 
it be regeneration, atonement ; or if it be only 
a prophecy that you interpret, a biography that 
you sketch, a passage in history on which you 
throw light, a parable whose meaning you inter- 
pret. Whatever your subject be, let it be for 
the time the one engrossing subject of your 
mind ; and until you have preached on it let 



144 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

nothing come in to divert in the least attention 
from it. 

Carlyle says somewhere, in his half-cynical 
fashion, that " the candid judge will in general 
require that a speaker, in so extremely serious a 
universe as this of ours, have something to speak 
about."* It is a good rule. Your congregation 
will hold you to it ; and the only way to meet 
their just and constant demand upon you is by 
having the mind thus centred upon a subject, 
filled with its meaning, made alive with its influ- 
ence. 

Here is one vital advantage in preaching with- 
out one's notes before him. I said in my first 
talk that there was a certain disadvantage in this, 
in the matter of exchanges ; because these do 
not give the relief, when the manuscript is want- 
ing, which they otherwise would. But there is a 
greater disadvantage, so far as the congregation 
is concerned, in using the essay. No enthusiasm 
may go with it, or out from it upon others. A 

* Miscellanies, vol. iv. p. 311 ; review of Scott's Life. 



INTEREST THUS KINDLED. 1 45 

sermon which is read, without having been re- 
absorbed in the mind, never has vital virtue in it. 
I have heard such read in my own pulpit — man- 
uscript sermons, yellow with time ; and, while I 
would not undertake to set bounds to God's om- 
nipotence, I have said to myself as the reading 
went on, ' there is not the least natural tendency 
in a thousand such sermons to convert a mouse.' 
But if you follow the course I have outlined, and 
throw your whole enthusiasm for the time into 
the subject which you are treating, when you are 
abroad as when you are at home, there will no 
doubt be labor in it, but the labor will bring its 
great reward, in the glory of God, and the good 
of those whom you address. 

Three years ago, on a beautiful Easter Sunday, 
I went into an Anglican Chapel in France, and 
heard a sermon, of fifteen or eighteen minutes' 
length, on the Lord's Resurrection. At the 
close, the preacher said : " And now if there be 
any among you who to-day have come hither 
simply upon the cold legs of custom, then " — 



I46 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

so and so. I thought it not an impressive ad- 
dress, considering the brightness and warmth of 
the day, and that many of us were there for the 
first time in our life. But I say to you, Young 
Gentlemen : If any of you ever go into the pulpit 
' simply upon the cold legs of custom,' be very 
careful to take a manuscript with you. But if 
you go to speak to the assembly because your 
mind is full of the truth, and you long to impart 
that truth to them, for their sakes and for God's 
sake, — then charge your mind with it, and speak 
it with all the force you can give it, without any 
notes. 

And Secondly : To speak freely and usefully 
without notes one should have, from the very 
beginning of his discourse, distinctly in view, 
a definite end, of practical impression, zvhicli his 
disco ins e is to make and leave on the minds be- 
foic him. — He must speak for a purpose ; and 
the purpose must propel and govern the sermon. 

Of course this is not peculiar to unwritten 
sermons. Every sermon should have such an 






PRACTICAL IMPRESSION OF TRUTH. 1 47 

end, of practical impression, present from the 
outset to him who prepares it, both while he is 
preparing and when he is preaching it But this 
is absolutely indispensable to one who is to preach 
without aid from notes. Otherwise the force of 
his moral nature will never be enlisted in the 
work he has in hand. 

Your venerable Presbyterian Form of Gov- 
ernment says — or the Introduction to it says 
— that "Truth is in order to goodness." I do 
not live under that Form of Government pre- 
cisely, and so perhaps I should prefer to modify 
somewhat that form of expression. Truth, I 
take it, is in its essence the reality of things ; 
and truth, in expression, is the representation of 
that reality. It does not exist, therefore, I sup- 
pose, with reference to any thing ulterior to 
itself. It is, ' whether or no ; ' without regard to 
consequences. But certainly Truth is declared 
to us, the Divine Truth, in order to its specific 
impression upon life and character ; and that, I 
take it, is really the import of this statement. 



I48 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

The whole Bible bears on practical results ; and 
here is one great secret of its power. In this, 
as in other things, it is unique and supreme in 
the world's literature. It is not a mere collection 
of interesting biographies, historical narratives, 
precepts, arguments, proverbs, songs ; but it all 
bears, from first to last, on definite results, — the 
conversion of men to God, their upbuilding in 
righteousness. Whoever preaches, then, on 
themes derived by him from the Bible, should 
have the same end distinctly in view.* 

It is necessary, as I said, in order to enlist his 
moral nature, ardently, thoroughly, in the work 
he has to do. Intellectual excitement is rela- 
tively without warmth. Intellectual enthusiasm, 
for a proposition which has no special practical 
relation to those to whom it is being presented, 
never has the force of real passion in it. The 
heating power in the nature of man is in its 
moral element. This gives the inward glow and 
vividness to all his intellectual processes, when it 

* Note XIX. 



AN INTELLECTUAL STIMULANT. 1 49 

inspires them. Power and impulse always come 
from it 

The desire after practical usefulness is. there- 
fore, indispensable to one who would preach well 
without his notes. He may be logical, in the 
absence of it ; but his will never be " logic on 
fire," till his moral nature has clearly in view an 
end toward which it is steadily working, pushing 
the instrumental intellectual force, till that also 
glows with it. 

The minister requires this, also, as an intel- 
lectual corrective and stimulant ; to give unity 
to his discourse, progressiveness, steadiness, 
and an easy celerity, to his mental operations. 
Without it, he will be like the ship tossing on the 
waves, hither and yon, in the darkness of a fog. 
The fog lifts ; the headland, or the light, appears ; 
and instantly the ship swings into her course. 
Instead of heaving idly about, passive on the 
rolling waters, making every one sea-sick, she 
steadies on an even keel, catches the wind upon 
her wings, and flies toward the point the posi- 



I50 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

tion of which has now been revealed. So an 
ultimate foreseen point rfappui, a rallying point 
for all parallel or converging lines of the dis- 
course, is necessary to give steady and swift 
progressiveness to the mind which moulds and 
delivers that discourse. The converging of all 
subordinate thoughts into one grand thought, to 
be pressed upon the hearer, then is secured ; 
like the convergence of the streams running 
toward a 'clove' in the line of the hills. Hither 
and thither, northward, southward, run the 
brooks, yet ever meeting and mingling into one, 
as they draw toward the gap, till the thousand 
trickles become a torrent as they pour at last 
through the gate into the valley. So all collateral 
thoughts, arguments, illustrations of a sermon, 
when bearing upon a single end of moral impres- 
sion, combine their forces, rush together at last 
in a common channel, and strike with heavy 
impact on the mind. 

This is necessary, too, to keep men from 
yielding to that habit of discursiveness which is 



RESTRAINS DISCURSIVENESS. I 5 I 

the easily besetting sin of many full minds, and 
which is absolutely fatal to one who is speaking 
without his notes. No matter how brilliant the 
mind may be, how richly stocked with historical 
knowledges, how prolific in fancy, image, felici- 
tous phrase, — this habit of discursiveness will 
weary out the most patient congregation. 

You hear one begin, for example, with some say- 
ing of the Master to John the Baptist, or to one 
of his disciples. First he describes the scenery, 
of the Jordan valley, or of the shores around the 
sea of Tiberias ; then the persons, to whom the 
saying was addressed ; then the possible relations 
of John the Baptist to the sect of the Essenes ; 
then the relations of this sect to the others, and 
to the whole Herodian family ; then he plunges 
into the interminable tangle of the Herodian 
genealogy, and shows the relations of this one 
and that one to the Roman emperors ; then of 
the Roman empire itself to the ancient civiliza- 
tion, with a tracing out of the roots and the 
fruits of that civilization ; and then he goes 



152 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

kiting, at large, through the universe ; — till the 
hour is ended before he has fairly got back to 
his text ! Nobody can stand such preaching a 
great while. The most patient listener will wish 
by-and-by that the man's brain would explode, 
and so make an end.* The best corrective to 
such a dangerous tendency of mind is to have 
an end, of practical impression, always in view, 
from the outset on. As soon as you give one a 
purpose to be accomplished, things will fall into 
their places; extraneous things will be instinct- 
ively, and of course, ruled out ; there will be 
motion and current to his speech. 

This is important, also, as it regards the mere 
matter of style. Studious men, dwelling in 
' the solitary and still air of delightful studies,' 
are apt to get a style which reminds one of the 
remark that some one has made of the style of 
Tertullian — " splendid, but dark, like polished 
ebony." Or, it is stiff, with interwoven threads 
of gold, — like a rich brocade, beautiful to look 

* Note XX. 



INFLUENCE ON STYLE. 1 53 

upon, beautiful for parade, but not fitting the 
limbs, not furnishing a habit in which the mind 
may freely walk and freely work. That is the 
tendency with studious men ; whose literary 
enthusiasm is apt to get the mastery over their 
practical evangelical zeal. Their style is sure to 
become too stately. 

On the other hand, there is a dangerous ten- 
dency in speaking without notes to a mere wash 
of words, a debilitating fluency, in which is 
neither head nor point ; where nothing arrests 
and strikes attention, rouses the imagination, 
awakens historical recollection, elevates or ani- 
mates any power ; where all is a dreary out-pour 
of verbiage, incessantly coming, like the ribbons 
in a juggler's trick. "What color will you have, 
Gentlemen ? " and out it comes ; twenty yards of 
blue, and then twenty of pink, and more and 
more as it is ordered. The man who thus speaks 
seems to be pulling or pumping words out of 
some bottomless reservoir within, without the 
smallest possible reference to any result to be 



154 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 



accomplished ; and his own feeling, his own 
thought- power, washes away on the flux of his 
words. No single quality which style ought to 
have is present, or is possible, under such condi- 
tions. 

Dr. Emmons used to say that 'style should be 
like window-glass, perfectly transparent, and 
with very little sash.' * That is good, so far as it 
goes ; but there are certain important qualities 
of style which are not covered by that descrip- 
tion. I should say, rather, that style is to 
thought what the body is to the spirit. It should 
be itself vital, with a life of its own, sympathetic 
and responsive to the thought within. It 
should be proportionate, symmetrical, with what- 
ever of beauty may properly belong to it. It 
should be gentle enough to fondle a child, facile 
enough to laugh or sing, strong enough to strike 
a heavy blow, for righteousness or in self-defence, 
when occasion calls for it. That is always the 
best style which answers most perfectly to the 

* Note XXI. 



TRUE ELOQUENCE. I 55 

thought within, as the body to the spirit. And 
you can get such a style as that, fashion it, keep 
it, only by work. You do not get it in the Semi- 
nary, nor out of books. You get it by preach- 
ing, with a practical aim distinctly in view ; by 
letting your thought wreak itself upon expres- 
sion, while it is urgent and hot within you. Thus 
you gain the expression most natural to yourself, 
in your best moods ; and always you will find 
that that mode of expression which to you is 
most natural is also to others most effective and 
powerful. 

Observe the plain uneducated man : how well 
he talks, when he has an end to accomplish by 
it ! The silent man, silent in all common assem- 
blies, — there comes a time when something 
calls out the force within him, some story to be 
told, some enterprise to be urged, some friend to 
be championed ; and he -speaks with freedom, 
promptness, power. Without knowing it him- 
self he almost realizes Milton's description of a 
true eloquence : ' his words, like so many nimble 



I56 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

and airy servitors, trip about him at command, 
and in well-ordered files, as he would wish, fall 
aptly into their own places.' * 

Hear the lawyer, on some important occasion, 
when life is imperilled, or personal liberty, or 
when large properties or great reputations are 
suddenly at stake. You have heard him as a 
lecturer, perhaps, and thought him dull, or 
merely rhetorical — more intent on pleasing 
himself with his fancies and phrases than on 
pushing his thought into your mind. But now, 
before the jury, when these great' interests are 
depending upon him, how full of force, impulse, 
persuasive enthusiasm, are his words ! His 
style itself is radically transformed. Every sen- 
tence is sharpened, compacted, inspired, by his 
endeavor to gain his end. The intensity of his 
purpose puts vigor and swiftness into his speech. 
The supreme energy, the real deivozrjg in utter- 
ance, only then comes forth. 

Still further, too, it must be remembered that 

* Note XXII. 



PRAYER QUICKENED. I 57 

a man who is intently at work to accomplish 
practical results by his preaching will pray over 
his sermons, a great deal more than will another 
not so moved ; and so he will get the inspiring 
help, the unction, and the grace, which come 
from communion with the Divine Mind. The 
closet will help the pulpit ; and there is no force 
or brilliance of mind, no fulness of knowledge, 
which can make the sermon what it may be and 
should be, without this touch from above upon it. 
So always have in view, Gentlemen, a definite 
end to be accomplished in preaching. Remem- 
ber Paul's maxim : " I press toward the mark." 
It is as good and true in sermonizing, as it is in 
Christian life and character. Have an aim in 
the sermon ; and never be satisfied till the 
sermon is as fit as you can make it to accom- 
plish that aim. A man in the Seminary with 
me once said, "I like to discuss subjects ; but I 
never know what to do with them, after they 
are discussed. I can only leave them, and go 
along." Such a man should always write his 



I58 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

sermons, if he preaches at all ; as an army 
should shelter itself in a fortress, when it cannot 
or dare not meet its enemy in the field ; as a 
man-of-war should blaze away at a distance, 
when it has no pikes or cutlasses to board with. 
But if you are intent upon practical ends, to 
which your whole force shall contribute, then 
the manuscript may go. For then your mind 
will gain force, foresight, energy, from its pur- 
pose ; and will give whatever of power and beauty 
arc natural to it to the very style of expression 
through which you seek to lead men to the 
throne of God.* 

Thirdly : Have in view individual Jicarers 
in the congregation, on whom you desire to make 
your impression, and with whose needs you are 
familiar ; to whom, therefore, your sermon is 
particularly adapted, both while you study and 
when you preach it. 

I am inclined to think that here was an 
advantage, — perhaps I should modify that 

* Note XXIII. 



INTEREST IN PERSONS. 1 59 

remark, and say that here was the advantage 
if anywhere, — in the old way of preparing men 
for the ministry, under the care of a particular 
pastor, as compared with the way in which you 
are being trained, and in which I was trained, 
in a Seminary ; under more learned, scientific, 
and laborious teachers. I think those men 
learned to be interested in persons, where we 
learn chiefly to be interested in subjects. They 
came in contact with individual minds, in a way 
which helped them in all their ministry, though 
their training was certainly less elaborate, sys- 
tematic, and scholastic, than ours. 

Perhaps this disadvantage in the modern 
system is compensated, doubtless it is dimin- 
ished, by the facilities which now abound for 
work in mission-schools, Bible-classes, prayer- 
meetings. I know, in my own experience, that 
I learned some things from a Bible-class, which 
I taught in the village-church at Andover, which 
have been as valuable to me in subsequent life as 
any thing which I learned from the magnificent 



l60 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

lectures which during the week I attended and 
enjoyed. I presume it is equally true of you. 
If not in this way, then in some other, you must 
get into vital contact with persons, as well as with 
themes. Otherwise your real force will never 
come out. The rays of light get heating power 
by being focussed through a lens, and made to 
converge upon one point. So a man's mental 
action becomes intense, penetrating, effective, 
as it contemplates a definite effect, on personal 
minds. 

Here was one great secret, certainly, of Dr. 
Nettleton's power. I do not know that his ser- 
mons would seem extraordinary to us, if we 
should now read them ; since we are not the per- 
sons whom he had in view in preparing and 
preaching them. But they were immensely effect- 
ive at the time, because he had before him indi- 
viduals, with whose states of mind he was familiar, 
and to whom the truth as presented by him was 
exquisitely adjusted, with every effort and every 
art. As a " fisher of men " he surpassed every 



THE LAWYER'S EXAMPLE. l6l 

one in the skill and assiduity with which he 
angled for particular souls. Thousands of anec- 
dotes illustrate this. Accordingly he worked 
with immense facility, sometimes preparing or 
remodelling sermons every day for weeks to- 
gether, and preaching them afterward, with an 
interest in them which saved him from exhaus- 
tion ; because his thought was intently fixed on 
the persons whom by means of them he would 
reach. 

So it is with the lawyer. See him before the 
jury, in a case where his convictions are strong, 
and his feelings are enlisted. He saw long ago, 
as he glanced over the box, that five of those in 
it were sympathetic with him ; as he went on, 
he became equally certain of seven ; the number 
now has risen to ten ; but two are still left, 
whom he feels that he has not persuaded or 
mastered. Upon them he now concentrates his 
power, summing up the facts, setting forth anew 
and more forcibly the principles, urging upon 
them his view of the case, with a more and more 



1 62 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

intense action of his mind upon theirs, until 
one only is left. Like the blow of a hammer, 
continually repeated, till the iron bar crumbles 
beneath it, his whole force comes, with ceaseless 
percussion, on that one mind, till it has yielded, 
and accepts the conviction on which the plead- 
er's purpose is fixed. Men say, afterward, "he 
surpassed himself." It was only because the 
singleness of his aim gave unity, intensity, an 
overpowering energy, to the mind it incited. 

I remember perfectly that the first time I ever 
had any thorough sense of freedom, facility, self- 
forgetfulness in preaching, was when, some twen- 
ty-five years ago, a gentleman of my parish — 
an unusually able and cultivated man, who had 
occupied high political and social positions, and 
for whom I had great respect — told me that he 
was practically a fatalist. He did not use the 
word, but that was what his language meant. 
He believed that every thing came to pass as 
God intended and wished that it should, and 
that all things would come out right in the end. 



A FATALIST. 1 63 



There he would leave the whole matter, of life 
and of -the future. Well : that struck at the foun- 
dation of human responsibility. It ruled the 
Bible out of the world, both law and salvation, 
at one sweep. It in fact invalidated human law ; 
taking from it all moral elements of authority 
and sacredness, and converting it into a simple 
mandate of force, for the conservation of mate- 
rial interests. I was determined, if possible, to 
push that notion out of his mind : and I remem- 
ber now the enjoyment which I had, and the 
easy vigor with which I wrought, in taking up an 
argument, weighing it, seeing precisely how it 
bore upon this point ; then treating another in 
like manner, and another ; combining them, 
bringing them in from different and unexpected 
points, — until it seemed to me the demonstra- 
tion was absolute, certainly to my mind, hope- 
fully to his. When I came to preach with that 
concentrated aim, that intense desire and con- 
tinuing purpose to reach if possible the one 
mind for which the whole sermon had been 



164 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

arranged, preaching was as easy as flight to the 
bird, or swimming to the fish. It was simply 
the natural motion of the mind, charged with 
its subject, filled with the argument, and intent 
upon the end which the argument was to serve. 

Before that my sermons had been always, I 
think, like the general cannonading which pre- 
cedes the real shock of battle. A hundred 
guns thundering away against the Cemetery- 
hill at Gettysburg, and a hundred guns in 
tremendous reply : all uproar and smoke, but 
nobody hurt ! It is the rifle-ball that does the 
business. So never confine yourselves to the 
contemplation of themes. Make themes your 
means for reaching persons ; and give the mind 
force, by giving it concentration. 

The true evangelical fervor comes in this way, 
with affectionate interest in personal souls. The 
Lord himself did not come to the world to pub- 
lish elaborate discourses to men. He was full of 
the truth ; and the truth flashed from him as 
occasion suggested. A sneering objection 



VARIETY THUS SECURED. 1 65 

brought one discourse from him ; an affectionate 
inquiry elicited another ; the dullness of his 
disciples incited another. And all the radiance 
which fills the gospels, flowing from His mind 
over the world, was first drawn forth by the 
minds around Him, to which He would minister 
light, comfort, purity, hope. In this, as in all 
else, the disciple should strive to be like his 
Lord. 

Observe, too, what variety you secure in this 
way, in the subjects which you treat : how per- 
fectly you avoid the danger, which may otherwise 
be a great one, of having a limited series of 
subjects, on which your mind most easily works, 
and to which it returns with readiest facility. 
You avoid this wholly, if your preaching has 
persons always in view, and not merely sub- 
jects. For there are all sorts of minds in a con- 
gregation, and in all sorts of states. Here is 
a sceptic, perhaps propagating his scepticism, 
who is to be answered, silenced, if possible con- 
vinced. Here is a person not sceptical in tern- 



1 66 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

per, but teased with unwelcome and disturbing 
doubts, which you arc to try to remove and dis- 
perse. Here is one indifferent, whom you must 
arouse, and startle into attention to the truth ; 
another, inquiring, undecided, whom you must 
urge into the way of righteousness. There are 
sinners to be converted, and sufferers to be 
soothed ; the tempted, who are to be warned 
and taught ; the imperfectly developed in Chris- 
tian grace, who need education in particular 
qualities ; the poor who must be cheered, the 
rich who must be taught a more generous liber- 
ality, — that " it is more blessed to give than to 
receive." 

Your congregation is always a microcosm. 
Little children are in it, as well as adults ; the 
aged, as well as the young and strong; all class- 
es of minds, in all sorts of relations, each with 
a different Past behind it. If you preach then 
to individuals, you will find subjects multiplying 
on your hands. Faster than you can use them, 
they will come. As you take each class, or case, 



PURSUE THE EFFORT. 1 67 

in turn, you will be really going the round of 
the Christian scheme, and unconsciously will 
be giving it a development as cosmic and many- 
sided as itself. 

And when you thus preach to individuals, be 
sure that you do not give over till you have, if 
possible, secured success. Don't think because 
you have preached the work is done ; or because 
an impression is strong on your mind, that it 
must of necessity be equally strong upon the 
minds to which you would transfer it. A minis- 
ter is always tempted to feel that because his 
argument is convincing to himself, it must be 
to others ; that because he has personally 
reached a high point, of feeling and vision, he 
has carried up everybody with him to the same. 
It may not be so at all. Your expectation may 
be very far from being realized ; your preaching 
be less effective than you suppose, and the re- 
sponse to it very different. Remember that you 
preach amidst influences which work ail the 
while against your efforts, and which, not unfre- 



1 68 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

quently, push out the truth faster and further 
than you can insert it ; so that the same man who 
on Sunday was moved as if by a word from God 
himself, has forgotten it all before Monday is 
ended. One who weeps to-day may scoff to-mor- 
row, and the feeling of the sanctuary may disap- 
pear altogether in Broadway or Wall Street. So 
keep' up your acquaintance with the minds you 
address, and never expect too much from any 
one sermon. 

A lady coming home on one of the steamships 
that cross the Atlantic, on the first day out saw 
a half-drunken sailor, who was insolent to the 
mate, knocked down on the spot, with a heavy 
blow. The blood gushed from his nostrils ; his 
face puffed up in swollen and purple ridges, be- 
neath the stroke : — it was to her simply fright- 
ful ! She was sickened by it, and left the deck. 
Below, she soon became sea-sick ; and three or 
four days passed before she again could come 
upon deck. Then she saw the same man stand- 
ing at the wheel ; and going swiftly up to him, 



FORESIGHT OF CONSEQUENCES. 169 

she asked, with womanly sympathy : " How's 
your head to-day ? " " West, nor' west, and run- 
ning free," was the answer that staggered her. 
He had wholly forgotten what to her had given 
that startling shock. Yon laugh at this ; but 
you will often find that it just about parallels 
the depth and the permanence of the impres- 
sion which you make by the sermons on which 
you most rely. What you thought sure to be 
fruitful, and to abide, has gone from the memory 
of those whom you especially addressed, before 
the morrow's sun is up. So never give up your 
thought of individuals, and your purpose to 
reach them with the truth, until you know that 
success is attained. 

And Fourthly : Always carry with you into tJie 
pulpit a sense of the immense conseque7tces which 
may depend on yotir full and faithful presenta- 
tion of tJie truth. 

There will be such consequences depending 
on it; since, when you preach, you are bringing 
the grandest moral force which the world has 



170 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

known into contact with minds constitutionally 
adapted to receive and retain impressions from it. 
It is not from ancient history, or law, that you 
are to draw your lessons and your motives. It is 
not from ethics, or speculative philosophy. It is 
from the world supernatural, the realms invisi- 
ble ; from beings, and facts, Divine and eternal. 
Hence come the influences which you are set 
to make influential upon men's minds ; from the 
Advent, and the Ascension ; from Sinai, and from 
Calvary ; from the manger at Bethlehem, and the 
Judgment throne. If you feel the impression of 
these on yourselves, and so preach to others — 
if you are each a living Gospel, believing the 
word, and preaching it because you are moved 
thereto by its own force — you have a tremen- 
dous instrument to use. Then your spirit will 
help your words. You will become true priests 
for God, radiating to others the influence which 
first has come to yourselves from Divine rev- 
elation. 

And you use this instrument, accomplish this 



DIFFERENT IMPRESSIONS. 171 

office, in circumstances the most helpful : in the 
shelter of the sanctuary ; in the assembly of 
communing souls ; with auxiliary services, appro- 
priate for the further impression of the truth; 
on the Lord's Day, — that still harbor in the 
week, surrounded by the breakwater of even 
human law, on whose tranquil bosom the soul is 
sheltered from the tumults of time. You are to 
bring the Gospel, then and there, into contact 
with the minds before you. There must be an 
impression from it, falling with power on those 
who hear it. This cannot be otherwise. It may 
work in one direction, it may work in another. 
It is like the sunshine, which touches the mead- 
ows, and makes them bloom in brighter verdure, 
which touches the sand, and makes it more dry 
and vitreous than it was : which touches one 
metallic plate, treated with iodine, and turns it 
purple ; another, treated with nitrate of silver, 
and turns it black. Some will resist your influ- 
ence : you cannot help it. Some will accept, 
and be forever quickened by it ; and this shall 



172 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

be to you a joy. You will feel, then, that you 
are accomplishing the noblest office which God 
ever gives to man on earth ; since the issue 
of your work is an influence upon character, 
and an influence upon character involves influ- 
ence upon destiny — immortal destinies flowing 
from character.* 

In revivals men feci this ; and it makes the 
dull eloquent as they feci it. At all times we 
should feel it, when wc enter the pulpit to de- 
clare to men God's message of grace. Often- 
times, when we are wholly unaware, there are 
minds in the congregation approaching the fate- 
ful point of transition from one course to an- 
other, like men riding side by side in a railway 
carriage till they reach the point where their 
paths diverge. They have come from Montreal 
to Rutland, perhaps ; riding together all the 
way. There, one of them steps to another seat. 
For a space their tracks run parallel still, but 
by degrees they diverge ; further, and further, 

* Note XXIV. 



CRITICAL POINTS IN EXPERIENCE. 1 73 

they go asunder ; till, of the two so lately riding 
and talking together, one has reached Boston, 
Liverpool, Berlin, the other San Francisco, 
Yokohama, Hong Kong. Side by side, a few 
weeks since, and now the diameter of the earth 
between them ! At any time there may be be- 
fore you minds approaching such critical points 
in their experience ; the turning-points, from 
which the whole course of their life shall run, in 
one direction or the other, forevermore. No cir- 
cle of the centuries shall again bring them to- 
gether. You do not know when these moments 
come ; and should always preach as if, among 
those whom you address, there might be some 
who had reached them now. 

What a striking thing that is in the crowded 
and radiant gospel of John, full of sublimest 
discourses and events, when he says in speaking 
of his first meeting with the Master : " It was 
about the tenth hour " ! About the tenth hour ? 
Why put so unimportant a circumstance into a 
gospel so brief at the best, and where sublime 



174 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

things have hardly room ? There is nothing 
strange in it. John could not forget, and must 
insert it. It was the first time he had talked 
with Him whose love and wisdom became there- 
after his inspiration, in life, and death, and the 
hereafter ; and the very moment was vivid still 
before his recollection. He remembered just 
how high the sun was, above the western Medi- 
terranean, at that supreme point in his experi- 
ence. He remembers it now. So there are 
moments in the experience of many, when they 
heard from the pulpit words of power, declaring 
to them God's love in Christ, which will be 
memorable to them forever, — as long as the 
issues of the choices which they made continue 
to unfold. 

You will not discern the presence of such 
moments, when you are speaking ; but never 
forget that they may come, in any sermon. And 
so let the consequences possibly depending on 
your faithful and full presentation of the truth 
be always distinctly present to you.* 
* Note XXV. 



RESTRAINT OF ECCENTRICITY. 1 75 

The thought of them will inspire you to the 
best use of every power which you possess, that 
you may make the highest thought, the widest 
study, converge upon present and practical 
results. It will have the effect to dignify and 
ennoble the mind itself ; stirring it up, as the 
statesman is stirred, on the great occasion, as the 
lawyer, when pleading for life in peril ; making 
it robust, manly, eager. It will make one seri- 
ous, too, reverent, modest ; and will keep him, 
absolutely, from resorting to those tricks, antics, 
grimaces, which seem now-a-days to be coming 
into fashion, and which are perhaps more likely 
to be adopted by those who preach without their 
notes than by those who carefully write their 
sermons. 

In regard to these eccentricities of manner, I, 
for one, would speak with caution. I am cer- 
tainly no precisian, in regard to gesture or 
speech in the pulpit. I believe that every man 
should use the power which God has given him, 
in the way most natural, under the impulse of 



1/6 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

the supreme consciousness that God is speaking 
His truth through him. If the teachings of any 
professor hindered me from that, with all respect 
and affection for him I would forget his instruc- 
tions as soon as I could. If Dr. Blair's volumes 
stood in the way of it, I would tie those volumes 
in one big package, and make a nice grave for 
them, in the garden or the sea. Let men speak 
with the purpose of reaching, helping, bless- 
ing others ; and each according to his own idiom, 
of nature and of habit.* 

But there is oftentimes a tendency, not to be 
individual, idiomatic, in speech, but to be theo- 
retical, imitative. Because one preacher gestures 
with his heels, — as Mr. Choate was once said to 
do, — a young man thinks that he must do the 
same. Because one drops his voice to a whisper, 
and follows with tremendous explosions of sound, 
somebody else feels bound to do likewise. He 
becomes in fact, without intending it, a hypo- 
crite, in the original sense — vTroxnn/^, an actor. 
* Note XXVI. 



SECOND-HAND ECCENTRICITIES. \"JJ 

Then he finds, very likely, that something outri 
and sensational in style draws an assembly, and 
so he seeks to reproduce that ; till he comes to 
be full, in his own utterance, of a second-hand 
sensational bosh, without substance or sense, — 
reminding one of what an English lady said of 
the shop-windows in Paris, during the Prussian 
siege : that " they showed fifty pots of mustard 
to an ounce of meat." 

Eccentricity is undoubtedly sometimes legiti- 
mate ; the privilege of an anomalous mind. 
Surprising and startling things sometimes are 
useful ; irritants of an attention which would 
otherwise fail. But when one attempts to imi- 
tate these, to ape eccentricity, to systematize sur- 
prises, and to put on the manner of somebody 
else, he is simply contemptible, and certain to 
fail. Yet when the itch for this thing, and for 
the transient notoriety which it brings, has once 
got into a man, there is no friction that I know 
of, of critical ointments, that will take it out. 
Nothing but a thorough alterative will do it; 



178 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

and the only proper alterative is, a sense of the 
far-extending consequences which depend on his 
ministry. That will make him serious, sober ; 
too grave for grimaces, and too thoughtful for 
tricks.* 

It will keep him, too, from yielding to the 
temptations to negligence and indolence. I do 
not know whether it was Occom, the Mohegan 
preacher to the Montauk Indians, or some other 
Indian candidate for the ministry — Dr. Prime 
perhaps could tell us — who was asked before the 
Presbytery the question which your Professor of 
Theology is very likely to ask of some of you : 
" What is original sin ? " and who answered that 
'he didn't know what other people's might be, 
but he rather thought that his was laziness! 
There are many others who suffer from the 
same, very radical in the soul ; and it often 
develops into actual transgression. You will be 
more in danger from it, if you have some facility 
in extemporaneous speech. You are busy with 
* Note XXVII. 



INDOLENCE PREVENTED. I 79 

other things during the week ; you postpone any- 
thorough preparation for the Sunday ; you find 
that for a time your people will be satisfied, at 
least the unreflecting will be, with something 
which has not cost much labor ; and after a 
while you come to intermit all careful and 
thorough analysis of subjects, and to trust to 
superficial suggestions, and to hasty and careless 
forms of speech. It will work like dry-rot, eat- 
ing out the heart of your strength. Water does 
not run down hill more surely than such a man 
declines in power. 

The way to guard against it is, to bear in 
mind, as before, the transcendent consequences 
which connect themselves with what you do, in 
the pulpit, and before you enter it. Then you 
will feel that you must not enter it without full 
preparation ; that the interests involved are too 
sacred and high. Your pulpit will be the 
throne of your thoughts, through all the week. 
Nothing else will seriously divert your mind 
from the work to be done in it. 



l80 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

The same contemplation, of results to be 
realized through your ministrations, will help to 
form in you that instinct of skill in your work 
of preaching which no Seminary can teach ; 
which you must each one gain for yourselves, 
by practice, experience, self-discipline, observa- 
tion. There is such a practical instinct of skill, 
in every art, and every profession ; which gives 
the intuitive law of success, and shows the only 
way to reach it ; by which one can instantly use 
his powers, to the greatest advantage, with the 
utmost facility, for accomplishing his ends. You 
see it everywhere. One man takes aim at the 
target carefully, and misses it wholly ; another 
simply raises his rifle, apparently without aim, 
and the obedient bullet strikes the bull's-eye. 
One man pitches and rolls in the surf-boat, 
wholly unable to reach the shore, till a wave 
overturns him, and he is flung upon the sand 
gasping and drenched ; another slides in on the 
incoming breaker, and before an imperceptible 
turn of the oar the boat rides smoothly to the 



THE INSTINCT OF SKILL. l8l 

beach, landing him high and dry on its safe 
ridges. 

So, everywhere, there is this instinct of skill ; 
which the preacher needs to get, like all other 
workmen ; which he can get only by earnest, 
continuous, conscientious work, in view of the 
results which depend on his work. When he 
thus labors, he will find after a while that the 
muscle of the mind, like that of the body, 
becomes autonomic, a law unto itself ; that the 
intuition with which it works is a safer and 
surer guide than precepts ; and that better 
and swifter success is reached than the most 
laborious planning could have gained. 

Remember, therefore, always, when you go 
into the pulpit, that there may be minds before 
you in the assembly at critical points in their 
progress, to which your words will give an im- 
pulse, in one direction or another, forevermore ; 
that there certainly are minds there adapted to the 
truth, and sure to take from it an abiding im- 
pression. Then your preparation will be thorough 



1 82 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

and careful. Then you will learn how to handle 
the themes committed to you with swiftest and 
with clearest skill ; and then whatever you do in 
the pulpit will be done with earnestness, effect- 
iveness, solemnity. 

And Fifthlv : Remember always to carry 
with you into the pulpit a sense of the personal 
presence of the Master. 

Every minister should do that, whether he 
reads his sermon from a manuscript, or speaks 
without notes. But he who preaches without 
his notes, pre-eminently should do it. The pres- 
ence of the Master ! It is, indeed, a wonderful 
thing. " Where two or three are gathered to- 
gether in My name, there am I in the midst of 
them." That is the promise, the divine declara- 
tion ; always fulfilled. It sounds like romance. 
To men of the world it seems no more than a 
fairy-tale. But it is the essential truth of God's 
word, the grandest reality of human experience. 
Here, in this room, this hour, is the Master ! in 
every assembly, where His children meet, and 



sense of Christ's presence. 183 

where His kingly word is spoken ! By the brook, 
where the Covenanters worshipped ; in the cata- 
combs, where Christian converts first uttered 
their praises ; in the great cathedral, where 
through all symbols devout spirits discern the 
JLord ; in wood and wilderness, where pilgrim 
and pioneer sing and pray : everywhere — Christ 
is present, whom saints adore, and angels serve ! 
And where He is, the place is holy : the service 
great. 

I remember words which I heard thirty years 
ago, when graduating from the Seminary, which 
I will read, if you will allow me. They were 
spoken by one then, and ever since, an honored 
and eminent pastor in Boston. I have never for- 
gotten them, from that day to this : — 

" In a certain congregation there was a hearer 
of whose presence the preacher was not aware 
during the delivery of his sermon. When the 
fact of that hearers presence was made known 
to him, it had a great effect upon the preacher. 
. . . Who was the preacher, and who this hearer ? 



184 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

The preacher I doubt not may have been any 
young minister present, and the hearer was 
Jesus Christ. Every time we have preached 
we have had Him for a hearer. When the great 
and the learned and the honored of the earth 
come to hear you, He is there, whose opinion of 
you, while it is infinitely more important than 
theirs, will cither confirm or reverse their judg- 
ment of you. When wc meet a few of our 
flock in that distant school-house on a dark and 
stormy night, and something whispers, Will you 
waste your time and strength on these poor 
people ? the Son of God is there to hear what 
you say to them, and to have an opinion of you 
for saying it, which is or will hereafter be a 
greater reward to you than the applauses of a 
throng. In the bungalow,, or under the plan- 
tain or the palm, or in those South African huts 
where you must creep like an animal to get in, 
remember that you cannot speak in His name 
but you will speak in His ear." * 

* Address of Dr. N. Adams : Bib. Sac. vol. ii. p. 709. 



FORBIDS FEAR OF MAN. l8$ 

Gentlemen : this was not said with reference, 
especially, to sermons preached without a manu- 
script. The speaker himself has always, I be- 
lieve, written his sermons, and has done it with 
admirable care and skill. But what he says ap- 
plies with, if possible, a more peremptory force to 
those who preach without their notes. 

Every minister who does this should remember 
the impressive and powerful truth which these 
words convey. The thought of the presence of 
Christ beside him will absolutely expel from his 
mind all fear of man. He will be undaunted 
before any criticism, on his manner, or looks, or 
mode of speaking, if he feels that he is so much 
in earnest that Christ approves. It will not limit 
his individuality. It will not disturb the most 
delicate and sensitive processes of his mind. It 
will breed in him no undue self - distrust. 
Rather, it will invigorate and quicken each power, 
and make him more natural, and more self- 
possessed. For God has created every power 
which we have ; has created them for His service ; 



1 86 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

and the Master recognizes every such power, and 
bestows upon it His benediction, if it be used in 
loyalty to Him. He does not disparage it ; and 
we shall not, if we sympathize with Him. . 

There is no use in trying to make ourselves 
like others, or to gain for ourselves a special 
faculty which others have, while we have not. 
This very variety is in God's plan; and to try 
to make one man like another, in the pulpit or 
out of it, is to contravene His design. You might 
as well try to make a rose resemble in petals a 
calla-lily ; or to make a nightingale, with its 
plaintive note, whistle military airs like a trained 
bullfinch. God gives to one a doctrine, to another 
a song ; to one the word of wisdom, to another 
the word of knowledge ; to another prophecy ; 
to another divers kinds of tongues ; to another 
the interpretation of tongues ; — and we are sim- 
ply to hold and use, as sacred to Him, whatever 
power we possess. He had a use, and a great one, 
for the rugged, self-willed, impatient Peter, as 
well as for the sensitive John ; for Luke, with 



PREVENTS A SECULAR SPIRIT. 1 87 

his delicate skill in narration, as well as for Paul, 
with his immense dialectical force. He has offices 
and services for each of us. What He wants is 
that we use, to the utmost limit, every power we 
possess, which He has given, which we have gladly- 
consecrated to Him. A sense of His personal 
presence with us will, therefore, but make us 
more wholly natural, self- revealing. It will be 
like the influence of the sun on the earth, bring- 
ing forth the retiring flowers and grasses, and 
crowninsf with blossoms all the trees. Whatever 
of force, whatever of beauty, there is in our 
minds, will come by means of it into more effect- 
ive and noble exercise. 

It will keep us from being secularized in 
spirit. When not absorbed in the high and vast 
subjects which the Gospel presents, the mind is 
apt to grow frigid and unfruitful on its spiritual 
side. It gets largely interested in other things ; 
literary, social, political movements, scientific dis- 
cussion, external reform. The richness of expe- 
rience will then fail in its utterance. The 



1 88 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

Christian glow, 4 the consecration and the gleam/ 
will not kindle its speech. But the sense of the 
personal presence of Christ is a constant cor- 
rective to such tendencies. It inspires one to 
enter the secrets of the Gospel, and to speak 
from a heart in sympathy with the Lord's. It will 
make our preaching — to adopt the distinction 
which some have drawn between John's gospel 
and those of the Synoptists — pneumatic, not 
somatic ; spiritual, not external. And such a 
preaching has always a power which the skilful- 
lcst arrangement of arguments and of words 
toils after in vain. 

It will inspire in us the true enthusiasm — the 
1 God within us ' — which is like the flame shin- 
ing within the transparent vase, and revealing 
itself through all exterior lines and tints. When 
this is kindled, and constantly burns, in any soul, 
it makes effort easy, success sure: it is itself a 
power for God, manifesting His glory through 
all the faculties which His Spirit illumines. 

It will make us glad, this sense of Christ's 



GREATNESS OF OUR OFFICE. 1 89 

presence ; it will make us fearless, ardent, de- 
voted. It will unite us in thought with all who 
have preceded us in the work, preaching His 
word. We shall see that he is the only true suc- 
cessor of the apostles, who brings the power of 
Christ, as they did, the Spirit of God, with His 
promises and truths, to operate on the immortal 
spirits for which Christ died. We shall feel this 
office the most august and illustrious on earth ; 
that no other can be ever its equal while time 
continues ; that every thing else, in society and 
in history, is but the scaffolding to it ; that its re- 
sults will still continue when Waterloo and Tra- 
falgar are wholly forgotten. There will come to 
us quickening inspiration from the thought, on 
every side. 

Even Paul himself rejoiced to say, when no 
man stood with him, but all men forsook him : 
" Notwithstanding, the Lord stood with me, and 
strengthened me ; that by me the preaching 
might be fully known, and that all the Gentiles 
might hear." If he needed this sense of Christ's 



I9O PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

presence, much more do we ! If he attained it, 
so may we. And when we recognize it, with 
an interior sweetness of certainty, we shall not 
feel abashed because we have no manuscript 
before us. To speak for Him will be our im- 
pulse. No matter how timid, nervous, self-diffi- 
dent, we are in ourselves, as we touch His pierced 
and royal hand we shall be instantly masterful 
and strong. We can enter, then, that marvellous 
experience of a derived omnipotence which Paul 
had, with all his humility, when he wrote to his 
friends from his prison at Rome : " I can do all 
things, through Christ which strcngtheneth 
me ! 

Finally : Gentlemen, Be perfectly careless of 
criticism, and expect success. 

You will meet criticism, of course ; for you are 
going out into communities filled with the influ- 
ence of literary culture and intellectual activity, 
and in those communities you are to preach. 
There, indeed, you must learn to preach. You 
are to learn in the pulpit. You cannot learn 



LEARNING TO PREACH. I9I 

to preach in the Seminary, any more than 
you can learn to swim by stretching your- 
selves upon this table. You may imitate the 
motions ; but the yielding and buoyant element 
beneath, is here quite wanting. The lawyer 
has to learn his skill by practice in the courts ; 
the physician his, not in clinics or laboratories, 
but in his actual ministry to patients. So you 
must learn to preach without notes, if you do it 
at all, in the pulpit, and nowhere else. If these 
eminent teachers shall have helped you toward 
it, your memory of them will be sweet and last- 
ing. If any words of mine shall be of the least 
assistance to you, I shall rejoice to have been 
permitted to speak them. But you must after 
all learn for yourselves, and learn by practice. 

And in this you will suffer under some disad- 
vantages. You will come into comparison with 
other, older, perhaps abler men, who have won 
already facility by practice ; who have, very 
likely, special gifts which you have not, while 
you may have gifts which are not theirs. You 



192 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

will come into comparison, not with ministers 
only, but with lawyers, and lecturers — many of 
them of engaging and eminent parts, who have 
trained themselves to speak, by incessant endeav- 
or, and with consummate success. You cannot 
expect to secure the same literary completeness 
and finish, in a spoken sermon, which you might 
have gained in one that was written. A spoken 
sermon is like a rapid and vivid sketch, rather 
than like a finished picture : vigorous in outline, 
strong in coloring, with life in its parts, but 
wanting extreme minuteness of execution in 
subordinate details. If you want that, and are 
determined to have it — if you must have every 
period ' round as Giotto's O,' if you cannot be 
satisfied without the ivory finish of Carlo Dolci, 
or the microscopic exactness of Denner's por- 
traits in the Vienna Belvedere, where each 
wrinkle and hair, one might almost say each 
pore of the skin, is presented on the canvas — 
then, assuredly, write your sermons. You cannot 
gain otherwise what you want. At least I do 



ACCEPTANCE BY THE PEOPLE. I93 

not believe it possible to give to a free and spo- 
ken sermon the same elaborateness and fineness 
of finish which you may to one written. 

But if you are willing to preach correctly, 
truthfully, energetically, — giving no special 
thought to the perfection of your finish, except 
to get as much of it as you can, without being 
hindered, and to be careless of what you lose, — 
then speak without writing. Your people will 
soon come to accept it, and will be stirred by it 
as they are not by essays. At first they may 
criticise, and compare your discourses with those 
of some one who writes with elegance and felici- 
ty ; but after a while they will choose the utter- 
ance through which an eager personal soul is 
speaking to them its present thought. 

I mean that most of them will. Of course, in 
almost every congregation, there will be some, 
like Iago, who are " nothing, if not critical." 
There may be those, I have known such per- 
sons, who think themselves wise in exact pro- 
portion as they suspect defects in others, and 



194 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

whose chief criterion of their evangelical insight 
and zeal appears to be the readiness and the 
rashness of their criticism of sermons. You 
must expect to encounter such people ; and 
sometimes, no doubt, especially in your earlier 
years, their criticism will cut you till it hurts. 

But remember this : that the criticism is often 
itself wrong and unreasonable, and then you 
may laugh at it. So it is everywhere. Hear 
the criticisms made in a great gallery of pic- 
tures, by those who are walking through it : the 
preference of one for some modern garish 
French interior, over the tender and harmonious 
beauty of Corrcggio's Holy Night ; of another 
for the crude flash and glitter of a recent land- 
scape, over the sweet and sunny splendor of 
Claude Lorraine. Half the criticism you hear, 
and nearly all the praise, will be like this ; in- 
trinsically worthless. Your ambitious passages 
may elicit an applause which it were folly to 
heed ; while your best sermons, except by a 
few, may be quite disregarded. 



LEARN FROM CRITICISM. 1 95 



But then remember, also, that the criticisms 
upon you will sometimes be just, and such as 
you may heed with lasting advantage. It will 
sometimes be said that ' you are too long,' — as 
you all are just now saying about me ; and you 
will know in yourself that it is so. Then ab- 
breviate, condense ; stop, if needful, before you 
are through. 'You use' too many words for 
your thought ; ' then compact, and compress. 
' Too dry and logical ; ' then expand, and decorate. 
' Too constantly doctrinal ; ' then preach the 
evangelical practice, till they want the whole 
circle of the doctrines of grace to inspire them 
to attempt it. Get hints and lessons from the 
sharpest criticism, and strive to correct what it 
indicates as faults. You will often learn most 
and best in this way, while it will utterly fail to 
disturb you ; for if your mind is wholly fixed on 
bringing the water of life to your people, you 
will not much care, except for their sakes, 
whether you offer it in a pewter mug or in a 
silver chalice. 



I96 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

After that, criticism may often help, but it 
never can hurt you. 

Be sure, when it comes, that you take it like a 
man, and are never overcome by it. Remember 
what Sheridan said, when he came out from the 
House of Commons, after they had hissed him : 
" It's in me, and [with an oath] it shall come 
out." Omit the oath, but make the vow. If it 
is in you, and you know it — the conviction of 
the truth, and the power to express it — deter- 
mine that it shall at last come out. And let the 
adverse breath of criticism be to you only what 
the blast of the storm-wind is to the eagle : a 
force against him, that lifts him higher. 

Remember that ere long the criticism will 
have wholly passed away, except in the result 
which it leaves upon your mind, and in the 
effect which it has upon your preaching. As your 
people become accustomed to your manner ; as 
they recognize your sincerity, and the earnest- 
ness of your work ; as they see in your sermons 
the fruit of study, and feel that you come to 



LIBERTY AT LAST. 1 97 

them from communion with God ; as you get 
a firm and vital hold on some among them, by 
meeting their difficulties, cheering their hearts, 
bracing their wills to a hardier effort, lifting 
them up to the serener air, — they will no more 
think of any criticism. You will enter into the 
liberty you have won. Your pulpit will be to 
you a home and a throne. You will become 
your own legislator, as to forms and modes, in 
subordination only and always .to Him for whom 
you speak to men. And when you come to that 
experience you will often find that it was the 
very criticism which stung which brought you 
to it, and that what has now been utterly for- 
gotten by those who made it, remains with you, 
in your greater facility, and your continually 
augmenting power. So be not dismayed by 
any criticism ; but forget it if unjust, and reap 
from it, if just, whatever of personal benefit you 
can. 

And always, Gentlemen, expect success. I 
do not mean for yourselves, specially, in the way 



I98 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

of fame, personal distinction, lucrative appoint- 
ments. These may come, or they may not. It 
is a matter of little consequence. Remember 
the words of Thackeray, that sad and sombre 
humorist : " What boots it whether it be West- 
minster or a little country spire which covers 
your ashes ; or if a few days sooner or later the 
world forgets you?"* Above all others, the 
minister should remember the profound and 
secular wisdom there is in those words of the 
Master : " For whosoever will save his life shall 
lose it ; but whosoever shall lose his life, for My 
sake, and the Gospel's, the same shall save it." 
Influence comes to self-forgctfulness. Honor 
and power have consecration for their condition. 
And you will find that the more careless you are 
of the things which the world esteems success, 
the more likely you are, if not to reap it, cer- 
tainly to reach the best results which it could 
have given, in your experience of happiness 
and of usefulness. 

* Pcndcnnis, vol. i. p. 203. 



POWER OF THE GOSPEL. 1 99 

But expect success in your work for Christ. 
You have a right to rely upon that ; and you 
need the strength which the foresight of it 
gives. The suspension-bridge must be anchored 
at both ends, if one would make it steadfast and 
strong. Men's souls require .to be equally braced. 
You must not only have an impulse to work, 
but the sure expectation of success in the 
work, — your mind and spirit must be poised 
upon both, — if you would be so tranquil in mind 
before your people that trains of thought shall 
pass incessantly on your words, without one pain- 
ful pause or jar. You have a right to expect 
such success. The truth of God, which is put 
into your hands, is the power of God to men's 
salvation ; and never was its power more plainly 
exhibited than in our own time. The harlots 
and the dock-thieves along our own wharves, 
converted to God, now praising Him whom once 
they cursed, and working for men whom once 
they wrecked, — there have been no greater tri- 
umphs of the Gospel since Christendom began. 



200 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

And this is the instrument which you have to 
use, sovereign and swift, the very sword of the 
Spirit. 

Your success may not come at the precise 
time when you expect it, or in the way which 
you anticipate. It may not come so that you 
yourselves shall see it on earth. The Master 
seemed to men to have realized but small suc- 
cess, in His sublime mission : twelve Apostles, 
and one of them a traitor ; of all the multitudes 
who had heard His words, His final following 
very small. Paul, the greatest of human 
preachers, did not appear to achieve large suc- 
: a few scattered and small congregations, 
in the various Greek cities, with error, impurity, 
dissension among them, the old Paganism still in 
part poisoning their life. But out of his labors, 
and those of his companions, Christendom has 
come. Out of the work of each faithful minis- 
ter come consequences of good, immense if un- 
seen. Out of the labor, and sacrifice, and 
patience, of multitudes of faithful saints and 



HASTENING MILLENNIUM. 201 

teachers, whose very names we do not know, 
has come our Christian civilization. 

Success is certain, in the end. Then seize it 
with your hope beforehand. Remember that 
while you are working Millennium draws nearer ; 
and that it is your privilege to hasten its com- 
ing. " Hasting the coming of the day of God ; " 
not hasting to it. I trust our Revisers will leave 
out the " unto :" there is no tig before the napov- 
aiav. Not suicide, but success, is what the 
apostle would have us seek. 

And even if success does not appear now, or 
ever on earth, it will surely come in the Beyond. 
More than once, as I have stood by the grave of 
a young minister, dead in his prime, — as I have 
bowed, amazed and baffled, before that event 
which seems to contradict all economies of God's 
universe, and to make the cultured power, the 
garnered knowledge, the vivifying spirit, of no 
avail, — I have remembered words in the same 
Address from which I have already quoted, two or 
three sentences of which you will let me read : — 



202 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

" We may remember that this life may not be 
the only term of service in which God may use 
us to influence others by the communication of 
our thoughts and feelings. It cannot be that 
eloquent communication from mind to mind is 
limited to earth. . . . From your lips, if they 
have dwelt with peculiar love and power on the 
doctrines of the cross, may the inhabitants of 
other worlds learn things yet imperfectly under- 
stood by them in the history of Redemption. It 
may be that you will then be called of God to 
be employed in wondrous acts of ministry to 
other worlds, because He can say of you, in re- 
membrance of your earthly attainments and 
service, ' I know that he can speak well.' " * 

Young Gentlemen : in all your life remember 
this ! Let it lift and delight you ! Cherish each 
force, and discipline every noblest power, under 
its inspiration ! Let all work take a lustre from 
it ! And expect the time when the Son of Man, 
no more invisible, shall be revealed ; and when by 

* Address of Dr. N. Adams ; Bib. Sac. vol. ii. p. 710. 



RESULTS OF THE METHOD. 203 

Him shall be opened to you, if here you have been 
His earnest servants, that grand and bright ex- 
panse of Heaven in which may He say to all of 
us : ' On earth ye have been the rulers over a few- 
things ; a few faculties, a few knowledges, a 
few opportunities : Lo, I will make you rulers 
over many things, in this kingdom of my 
Father ! ' * 

Gentlemen : I feel, very keenly, that in what I 
have said, I have been but giving you a catalogue 
of my conscious deficiencies. I have not stated 
a principle, or laid down a precept, that does not 
now come back to me, as I think of it, with an 
edge of rebuke. But no matter. These are the 
points where you need to be strong that you 
may preach, with real success, without writing 
your sermons. If you are willing to do the 
work, I think you will be well repaid. You will 
rescue more time, for larger studies. The frag- 
ments and bits of fractured days will become 
more available. A certain amount of nervous 

* Note XXVIII. 



204 PREACHING WITHOUT NOTES. 

waste, in desk and pen-work, will be spared. 
You will find the mind fruitful, or even luxuri- 
ant, at times when it otherwise would lie fallow 
and sterile. You will reach at times a height 
of conviction, an intensity of feeling, a suprem- 
acy of vision, which you cannot attain except 
the animation of the assembly be around you. 
I think you will have a more intimate sense of 
the presence of the Spirit of God within you, 
and of the Christ who stands beside you. 

But if you undertake the work, remember 
that you are to give to it time, labor, patience, 
prayer, invincible resolution ; and are not to give 
it up until you have reached all that success 
which, within the limitations of nature and of 
grace, is possible for you. Do it, not in indo- 
lence, and not in ambition. Do it, as an offering 
to the Master, in the spirit of perfect consecra- 
tion to Him ! Do it, as David did his office, when 
Araunah offered him the threshing-floor, and the 
wood, and the oxen for his sacrifice, and he said : 
" I will not offer unto the Lord my God of that 



CLOSE OF LECTURES. 205 

which doth cost me nothing." Do it, in the spirit 
of Paul, when he wrote to the Philippian Chris- 
tians f " If I be offered — my very life poured 
out as a libation — upon the sacrifice and service 
of your faith, I joy, and rejoice with you all." 

And so may God accept and bless you in all 
your ministry, and take you at its end to His 
own presence ! 



APPENDIX. 



207 



APPENDIX. 



A few notes have been hastily added to 
the foregoing lectures, containing, chiefly, brief 
passages from great writers, which illustrate or 
emphasize certain points in the text. If leisure 
had permitted, these might of course have been 
many times multiplied. Only those are now 
given which have chanced to be brought to dis- 
tinct remembrance, in reviewing the general 
course of thought, or in reading the proof-sheets. 

If these richly-woven words of the masters of 

sentences shall seem to hang on the lectures 

which precede them like tassels of gold upon a 

common fabric, it is hoped, nevertheless, that 

they may in part redeem the poverty which they 

cannot disguise, but must, undoubtedly, make 

more apparent. 

209 



210 APPENDIX. 



Note I. Page 40. 

" Every sermon costs me as much time and labor to 
write as to furnish the matter and subsequent corrections 
for six or seven. And I have more business to occupy 
my time and thoughts than you probably suppose. 
When you see me lounging about the garden, and prun- 
ing a rose-bush, you probably suppose that I am thinking 
of nothing else ; when, perhaps, I am deliberating on 
some weighty matter, on which I have to decide." — Letter 
of Abp. Whately: Life, vol. ii. p. 226. 

Note II. Page 46. 

Macaulay has pictured two different masters 
of the English language, in passages of his 
Essays which may be usefully read together : — 

" His [Dryden's] command of language was immense. 
With him died the secret of the old poetical diction of 
England, — the art of producing rich effects by familiar 
words. . . . On the other hand, he was the first writer 
under whose skilful management the scientific vocabulary 
fell into natural and pleasing verse. In this department 



APPENDIX. 211 



he succeeded as comp^tely as his contemporary Gibbons 
succeeded in the similar enterprise of carving the most 
delicate flowers from heart of oak. The toughest and 
most knotty parts of language became ductile at his 
touch." — Essay, on Dry den. 

" The style of Bunyan is delightful to every reader, and 
invaluable as a study to every person who wishes to 
obtain a wide command over the English language. The 
vocabulary is the vocabulary of the common people. 
There is not an expression, if we except a few technical 
terms of theology, which would puzzle the rudest peas- 
ant. . . Yet no writer has said more exactly what he 
meant to say. For magnificence, for pathos, for vehe- 
ment exhortation, for subtle disquisition, for every pur- 
pose of the poet, the orator, and the divine, this homely 
dialect, the dialect of plain working men, was perfectly 
sufficient." — Essay, on Pilgriirfs Progress. 



Note III. Page 47. 

From the multitude of illustrations in Shak- 
speare of his keen sense of the strength or the 
music of words, two may be taken, the contrast 
between them emphasizing each : — 



212 APPENDIX. 



" I stood like a man at a mark, with a whole army 
shooting at me : she speaks poniards, and every word 
stabs." — Much Ado about Nothing, act ii. sc. i. 

" His eye begets occasion for his wit : 
For every object that the one doth catch, 
The other turns to a mirth-moving jest ; 
Which his fair tongue, conceit's expositor, 
Delivers in such apt and gracious words, 
That aged ears play truant at his tales, 
And younger hearings are quite ravished, 

So sweet and voluble is his discourse." 

t 

Love's Labor's Lost, act ii. sc. I. 

Note IV. Page 47. 

" It was the Arcadia [of Sidney] which first taught 
to the contemporary writers that inimitable interweaving 
and contexture of words, that bold and unshackled use 
and application of them, — that art of giving to language, 
appropriated to objects the most common and trivial, a 
kind of acquired and adventitious loftiness, and to diction 
in itself noble and elevated a sort of super-added dignity, 
— that power of ennobling the sentiments by the lan- 
guage, and the language by the sentiments, — which so 



APPENDIX. 213 



often excites our admiration in perusing the writers of the 
age of Elizabeth." — Retrospective Review; quoted by 
Hallam : Lit. Hist, of Europe, part 2, chap. vii. 



Note V. Page 49. 

" The collocation of words is so artificial in Shakspeare 
and Milton, that you may as well think of pushing a brick 
out of a wall with your fore-finger, as attempt to remove 
a word out of any of their finished passages." — Cole- 
ridges Table Talk, July 3, 1833. 

Perhaps as fair an account as can be given of 
some of Coleridge's own sentences is contained 
in this later remark of his about Shakspeare : — 

" Shakspeare's intellectual action is wholly unlike that 
of Ben Jonson, or Beaumont and Fletcher. The latter 
see the totality of a sentence or passage, and then project 
it entire. Shakspeare goes on creating, and evolving B. 
out of A., and C. out of B., and so on, just as a serpent 
moves, which makes a fulcrum of its own body, and 
seems forever twisting and untwisting its own strength." 
— Table Talk, March 5, 1834. 



214 APPENDIX. 



Note VI. Page 52. 

" Stylus optimus et prasstantissimus dicendi effector ac 
m igister ; neque injuria. Nam si subitam et fortuitam ora- 
tionem commentatio et cogitatio facile vincit ; hancipsam 
profecto assidua ac diligens scriptura superabit. Omncs 
enim, sive artis sunt loci, sive ingenii cujusdam atquc 
prudentiae, qui modo insunt in ea re, de qua scribimus, 
anquirentibus nobis, omnique acie ingenii contemplanti- 
bus ostendunt se et occurrunt ; omnesque sententiae, 
verbaque omnia, quae sunt cujusque generis maxime il- 
lustria, sub acumen styli subeant et succedant necesse 
est ; turn ipsa collocatio conform itioque verborum per- 
ficitur in scribendo, non poetico, sed quodam oratorio 
numero et modo." — Cicero : De Oratorc, lib. I, cap. 
xxxiii. 

How vividly the effect of careful and habitual 
writing upon unwritten speech, in imparting to 
it the law of its own movement, is illustrated 
in the well-known figure which closes the same 
chapter : — 

" Ut concitato navigio, quum remiges inhibuerunt, 
retinet tamen ipsa navis motum et cursum suum, inter- 



APPENDIX. 215 



misso impetu pulsuque remorum : sic in oratione per- 
petua, quum scripta deficiunt, parem tamen obtinet 
oratio reliqua cursum, scriptorum similtiudine et vi con- 
citata." 

Note VII. Page 63. 

" It's a great mistake to think any thing too profound 
or rich for a popular audience. No train of thought is 
too deep, or subtle, or grand — but the manner of present- 
ing it to their untutored minds should be peculiar. It 
should be presented in anecdote, or sparkling truism, or 
telling illustration, or stinging epithet ; always in some 
concrete form, never in a logical, abstract, syllogistic 
shape." — Choate : Parkers Reminiscences, p. 261. 



Note VIII. Page 66. 

" Be a man's vocation what it may, his rule should be 
to do its duties perfectly, to do the best he can, and thus 
to make perpetual progress in his art. In other words, 
Perfection should be proposed. . . . 

" Difficulty is the element, and resistance the true 
work, of a man." — Channing: vol. ii. p. 385. 



2l6 APPENDIX. 

Note IX. Page 76. 

" Our ideas are so infinitely enlarged by Revelation, 
the eye of reason has so wide a prospect into Eternity, 
the notions of a Deity are so worthy and refined, and the 
accounts we have of a state of happiness or misery so 
clear and evident, that the contemplation of such objects 
will give our discourse a noble vigor, an invincible force, 
beyond the power of any human consideration." — The 
Spectator, No. 633. 

Note X. Page 80. 

" When the sermon is good we need not much concern 
ourselves about the form of the pulpit. But sermons 
cannot always be good ; and I believe that the temper in 
which the congregation set themselves to listen may be 
in some degree modified by their perception of fitness or 
unfitness, impressiveness or vulgarity, in the disposition 
of the place appointed for the speaker, — not to the same 
degree, but somewhat in the same way, that they may be 
influenced by his own gestures or expression, irrespect- 
ive of the sense of what he says. . . . But if once we 
begin to regard the preacher, whatever his faults, as a 
man sent with a message to us, which it is a matter of 



APPENDIX. 217 



life or death whether we hear or refuse, ... we shall 
look with changed eyes upon that frippery of gay furni- 
ture about the place from which the message of judgment 
must be delivered, which either breathes upon the dry 
bones that they may live, or, if ineffectual, remains re- 
corded in condemnation, perhaps against the utterer and 
listener alike, but assuredly against one of them. We 
shall not so easily bear with the silk and gold upon the 
seat of judgment, nor with ornament of oratory in the 
mouth of the messenger : we shall wish that his words 
may be simple, even when they are sweetest, and the 
place from which he speaks like a marble rock in the 
desert, about which the people have gathered in their 
thirst." — Ruskin : Sto?ies of Venice, vol. ii., chap, ii., 

§§ 13, 14. 

" The successive pulpits of the Abbey, if not equally 
expressive of the changes which it has witnessed, 
carry on the sound of many voices, heard with delight 
and wonder in their time. No vestige remains of the old 
mediaeval platform whence the Abbots urged the reluc- 
tant Court of Henry III. to the Crusades. But we have 
still the fragile structure from which Cranmer must have 
preached at the coronation and funeral of his royal god- 
son ; and the more elaborate carving of that which re- 
sounded with the passionate appeals, at one time of 



2l8 APPENDIX. 



Baxter, Howe, and Owen, at other times of Heylin, 
Williams, South, and Barrow. . . . The marble pulpit 
in the nave, given in 1S59 t0 commemorate the beginning 
of the Special Services through which Westminster led 
the way in re-animating the silent naves of our cathe- 
drals, has thus been been the chief vehicle of the varied 
teaching of those who have been well called 'the Peo- 
pie's preachers : ' ' vox quidem dissona, sed una religio.' 
— Stanley : Memorials of West. Abbey, ch. vi. p. 551. 



Note XI. Page 93. 

" The sun, which we want, ripens wits, as well as 
fruits.'' — Milton : Hist, of Britain, book iii. 

" To be free-minded, and cheerfully disposed, at hours 
of meat and of sleep and of exercise, is one of the best 
precepte of long lasting."' — Bacon 's Essays, xxx. 

" Happily for my eyes, I have always closed my 
studies with the day, and commonly with the morning; 
and a long, but temperate, labor has been accomplished, 
without fatiguing either the mind or body." — Gibbon's 
Memoirs, p. 1 17. 



APPENDIX. 219 



Note XII. Page 96. 

" The most wearisome details of questions, now this 
long while settled and forgotten, receive a suffusion of 
interest and color from the constant play around them 
of wide and rich human wisdom. Whatever he handled 
... all was treated with that nobility of idea and expres- 
sion which mere talent is invariably the better for study- 
ing, but which is only inborn, familiar, and perfect, in 
a few men of fine genius and deep morality of nature. 
Passion left flaws to offend a fastidious taste, and too 
frequently marked his gravity with exaggeration, and 
his humor with clumsiness. But these were mainly 
accidents of atmosphere. Notwithstanding them, we look 
in vain elsewhere in the history of English politics for 
the illumination of such questions as those before us, 
by such amplitude of knowledge, united to so much 
comprehension, force, and elevation." — Morley : Study 
of Edmund Burke, p. 167. 

" His wonderful ability for comprehending and reason- 
ing, his quickness of apprehension, his faculty for 
analyzing a subject to its elements, for seizing on the 
essential points, for going back to principles and forward 



220 APPENDIX. 



to consequences, and for bringing out into an intelligi- 
ble and sometimes very obvious form what appeared 
obscure or perplexed, remained unaltered to the last. 
This noble intellect, thus seen with a diminished lustre 
of imagination, suggested the idea of a lofty eminence, 
raising its form and summit clear and bare towards the 
sky, losing nothing of its imposing aspect by absence 
of the wreaths of tinctured clouds, which may have in- 
vested it at another season. . . . He was eminently 
successful on subjects of an elevated order, which he 
would expand and illustrate in a manner which sustained 
them to the high level of their dignity. This carried him 
near some point of the border of that awful darkness 
which encompasses, on all sides, our little glimmering 
field of knowledge ; and then it might be seen how aware 
he was of his approach, how cautiously, or shall I say 
instinctively, he was held aloof, how sure not to abandon 
the ground of evidence, by a hazardous incursion of 
conjecture or imagination into the unknown. He would 
indicate how near, and in what direction, lay the shaded 
frontier ; but dared not, did not seem even tempted, to 
invade its 'majesty of darkness.'" — John Foster: 
Observatio?is on Robei't Hall. 



APPENDIX. 221 



Note XIII. Page ioo. 

" You have letters, but no learning, that understand so 
many languages, turn over so many volumes, and yet are 
but asleep when all is done." — Milton, to Sahnasius. 

Note XIV. Page 103. 

" I call, therefore, a complete and generous education 
that which fits a man to perform, justly, liberally, and 
magnanimously, all the offices, both private and public, 
of peace and war." — Milton, on Education. 

Note XV. Page 106. 

" Great scholar he was none, the Latin Testament, 
gotten by heart, being the master-piece of his learning ; 
nor any studied lawyer, never long living, if admitted, in 
the Inns of Court ; nor experienced soldier, though neces- 
sity cast him on that calling when the Duke of Bourbon 
besieged Rome ; nor courtier in his youth, till bred in the 
Court, as I may call it, of Cardinal Wolsey : and yet, that 
of the lawyer in him so helped the scholar, that of the 
soldier the lawyer, that of the courtier the soldier, and that 



222 APPENDIX. 

of the traveller so perfected all the rest, — being no 
stranger to Germany, well acquainted with France, most 
familiar with Italy — that the result of all together made 
him for endowments eminent, not to say admirable." — 
Thomas Fuller : on Cromwell, Earl of Essex. Church 
Hist, of Britain, cent. 16, book v. 

Note XVI. Page 108. 

" Of eloquence it has been eloquently said : ' Eloquen- 
tia sicut flamma, materie alitur, motu excitatur, urendo 
clarcscit.' Mr. Pitt thus happily rendered the passage: 
' It is of eloquence as of a flame: it requires matter to 
feed it, motion to excite it, and it brightens as it burns.' " 
— Preface to Lord Russell's Life of Charles James Fox. 

Note XVII. Page 118. 

Yet there are admirable sermons to which we 
may almost apply Goethe's words about the 
characters of Shakspeare, as quoted by Car- 
lyle : — 

" His characters are like watches with dial-plates of 
transparent crystal : they show you the hour, like others, 



APPENDIX. 223 



and the inward mechanism also is all visible." — On 
Heroes, Led. 3. 

Note XVIII. Page 121. 

It is hazardous to introduce extended de- 
scriptions of natural scenery into sermons, lest 
the personal experience with which they are 
connected be rather hidden than illustrated by 
them ; and lest — as has sometimes happened — 
the sermon itself shall seem to have been con- 
structed with reference to them, as if a house 
had been planned to match a mantel-piece. 
But, occasionally, they add to a discourse a 
vivid and memorable moral force, as well as 
rare pictorial beauty. 

The following passages from a modern ser- 
mon illustrate, perhaps, both the danger and 
the gain : — 

" The more you lose your isolated self, and the 
thoughts and feelings which cluster round it, and take 
instead into you the thoughts and feelings of others, the 



224 APPENDIX. 



richer and the more varied, the more complex and the 
more interesting, and therefore the more vividly indi- 
vidual, becomes your being. . . . 

"It was my fortune last year, in going from Torcello 
to Venice, to be overtaken by one of the whirlwinds 
which sometimes visit the south. It was a dead calm, 
but the whole sky, high overhead, was covered with a 
pall of purple, sombre and smooth, but full of scarlet 
threads. Across this, from side to side, as if darted by 
two invisible armies, flew at every instant flashes of 
forked lightning ; but so lofty was the storm — and this 
gave a hushed tenor to the scene — that no thunder was 
heard. Beneath this sky the lagoon water was dead 
purple, and the weedy shoals left naked by the tide 
dead scarlet. The only motion in the sky was far away 
to the south, where a palm-tree of pale mist seemed to 
rise from the water, and to join itself above to a self- 
infolding mass of seething cloud. We reached a small 
island and landed. An instant after, as I stood on the 
parapet of the fortification, amid the breathless silence, 
this pillar of cloud, ghostly white, and relieved against 
the violet darkness of the sky, its edge as clear as if 
cut with a knife, came rushing forward over the lagoon, 
driven by the spirit of wind, which, hidden within it, 
whirled and coiled its column into an endless spiral. 



APPENDIX. 225 



The wind was only there, at its very edge there was not 
a ripple ; but as it drew near our island it seemed to 
be pressed down upon the sea, and, unable to resist 
the pressure, opened out like a fan in a foam of vapor. 
Then with a shriek which made every nerve thrill with 
excitement, the imprisoned wind leapt forth, the water 
of the lagoon, beaten flat, was torn away to the depth 
of half an inch, and as the cloud of spray and wind 
smote the island, it trembled all over like a ship struck 
by a great wave. We seemed to be in the very heart 
of the universe at a moment when the thought of the 
universe was most sublime. ... It is in such a moment 
when, as it were, you find your individuality outside of 
you, in the being of the universe, that you are most 
individual, and most able to feel your being, though not 
to think it." — Stopford A. Brooke: Sermon on In- 
dividuality. 

Note XIX. Page 148. 

" Truth is the beginning of every good to the gods, 
and of every good to man : and he who would be blessed 
and happy should be from the first a partaker of the truth, 
that he may live a true man as long as possible, for then 
he can be trusted ; but he is not to be trusted who loves 



226 APPENDIX. 



voluntary falsehood, and he who loves involuntary false- 
hood, is a fool." — Plato : Laws, book v, sec. 730. 



Compare with this the loftier saying of a Chris- 
tian philosopher : — 

" The energies of the intellect, increase of insight, and 
enlarging views, are necessary to keep alive the substan- 
tial faith in the heart. They are the appointed fuel to the 
sacred tire. In the state of perfection all other faculties 
may, perhaps, be swallowed up in love ; but it is on the 
wings of the cherubim, which the ancient Hebrew doctors 
interpreted as meaning the powers and efforts of the 
intellect, that we must first be borne up to the 'pure 
Empyrean ; ' and it must be seraphs, and not the hearts 
of poor mortals, that can burn unfueled anil self-fed." — 
Coleridge: Lay Sermons, p. 156, Burlington Ed. 

Note XX. Page 152. 

" This singular treatise contains a profusion of epithets, 
new-created words, paraphrases, and repetitions, conveyed 
in long and intricate periods. He clouds his meaning 
by his gorgeous rhetoric : never content with illustrat- 



APPENDIX. 227 



ing his sentiment by an adapted simile, he is perpetu- 
ally abandoning his subject to pursue his imagery. He 
illustrates his illustrations, till he has forgotten both their 
meaning and applicability. Hence his style is an endless 
tissue of figures, which he never leaves till he has con- 
verted every metaphor into a simile, and every simile into 
a wearisome episode. . . . The whole is a confused med- 
lev of great and exuberant genius, wasting and bur- 
lesquing uncommon powers." — Turner's Hist. Anglo 
Saxons, vol. hi., pp. 351, 352. (On Aldhelm, Abbot of 
Malmsbury.) 

Note XXI. Page 154. 

This reference to Dr. Emmons, made upon 
the imperfect recollection of the moment, does 
not represent with entire correctness his remark ; 
and as he was a very exact man it is better to 
give his apothegm with exactness : — 

" Style is only the frame to hold our thoughts. It is 
like the sash of a window ; a heavy sash will obscure the 
light. The object is to have as little sash as will hold the 
lights, that we may not think of the frame, but have the 
most light." — Prof. Park's Memoir, p. 328. 



228 APPENDIX. 

The Doctor himself did not approve of preach- 
ing without notes ; and if he had foreseen that 
he was ever to be referred to in a lecture upon 
the subject it would very likely have added fresh 
emphasis — if that were possible — to his mild 
declaration that " the most important requisites 
for an extemporaneous preacher are ignorance, 
impudence, and presumption." Yet his biogra- 
pher says of one celebrated passage in a sermon 
of his : " There are internal signs that his light- 
ning-like comments may have been made extem- 
pore in that paragraph. The electric spirit of 
them has vanished from the words as they appear 
in type." (p. 330). 

Even with him, then, it was the unwritten 
word, not the written, which flamed and burned. 

Note XXII. Page 156. 

The whole familiar and noble passage may 
well be quoted : — 

" For me, readers, although I cannot say that I am 
utterly untrain'd in those rules which best rhetoricians 



APPENDIX. 229 



have given, or unacquainted with those examples which 
the prime authors of eloquence have written, in any 
learned tongue ; yet true Eloquence I find to be none but 
the serious and hearty love of truth : and that whose 
mind soever is fully possest with a fervent desire to 
know good things, and with the dearest charity to infuse 
the knowledge of them into others, when such a man 
would speak, his words (by what I can express) like so 
many nimble and airy servitors trip about him at com- 
mand, and in well-order'd files, as he would wish, fall 
aptly into their own places." — Apology for Smectymnuiis. 

Note XXIII. Page 158. 

" The greatest thoughts are wronged, if not linked 
with beauty ; and they win their way most surely and 
deeply into the soul when arrayed in this their natural 
and fit attire. . . . Thus outward beauty is akin to some- 
thing deeper and unseen, is the reflection of spiritual 
attributes." — Channing : Works, vol. ii. p. 366. 

Note XXIV. Page 172. 

" Our great thoughts, our great affections, the truths 
of our life, never leave us. Surely, they cannot separate 



230 APPENDIX. 



from our consciousness ; shall follow it whithersoever 
that shall go, and are of their nature Divine and immor- 
tal." — Thackeray, Esmond, book iii. chap. vi. 

Note XXV. Page 174. 

" Sooty Manchester, — it too is built on the infinite 
abysses ; over-spanned by the skyey firmaments ; and 
there is birth in it, and death in it ; — and it is every whit 
as wonderful, as fearful, unimaginable, as the oldest 
Salem or prophetic city. Go or stand, in what time, in 
what place we will, are there not Immensities, Eternities, 
over us, around us, in us : 

' Solemn before us, 
Veiled, the dark Portal, 
Goal of all mortal : — 
Stars silent rest o'er us, 
Graves under us silent.' " 

Carlyle : Past and Present, book iii. chap. xv. 

Note XXVI. Page 176. 

" In all the accounts one reads of myrrh, frankincense, 
and other ' medicinal gums,' one always finds different 



APPENDIX. 231 



qualities mentioned ; the best being what exudes sponta- 
neously, and not by tapping or boiling down. And so it is 
with apothegms. If a man taps himself to draw them 
out, he will be the more likely to sacrifice truth to an- 
tithesis." — Letter of A bp. Whately : Life, vol. ii. p. 312. 



Note XXVII. Page 178. 

Milton's good word for occasional sarcasm is 
certainly just : — 

" Even this vein of laughing, as I could produce out 
of grave authors, hath ofttimes a strong and sinewy 
force in teaching and confuting." — Milton : on Remon- 
strant's Defence. 

But the maxim of Lord Bacon seems always 
the best one for the pulpit : — 

" As for jest, there be certain things which ought to be 
privileged from it ; namely, religion, matters of state, 
great persons, any man's present business of importance, 
and any case that deserveth pity. Yet there be some 
that think their wits have been asleep, except they dart 



232 APPENDIX. 



out something that is piquant, and to the quick. That is 
a vein which should be bridled : 

" Parce, puer, stimulis, et fortius utere loris." — 
Bacon's Essays, xxxii. 



Note XXVIII. Page 203. 

" The rugged gentleness, the wit whose glory 

Flash'd like a sword, because its edge was keen, 
The fine antithesis, the flowing story ; — 

Beneath such things the sainthood is not seen, 



" Till in the hours when the wan hand is lifted 

To take the bread and wine, through all the mist 
Of mortal weariness our eyes are gifted 

To see a quiet radiance caught from Christ ; 



" Till from the pillow of the thinker, lying 

In weakness, comes the teaching, then best taught, 
That the true crown for any soul in dying 

Is Christ, not genius, and is faith, not thought. 



APPENDIX. 233 



" O Death, for all thy darkness, grand unveiler 
Of lights on lights above Life's shadowy place, 
Just as the night, that makes our small world paler, 
Shows us the star-sown amplitudes of space ! 

" O strange discovery ! Land that knows no bounding, 
Isles far off hail'd, bright seas without a breath, 
What time the white sail of the soul is rounding 
The misty cape — the promontory Death ! " 

Rev. William Alexander : 
On the Death of Archbishop Whately. 



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